


Little Fishie

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [7]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Banter, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Feral Disaster Brat Jaskier, Gen, Geralt Is In Denial, Hot Tub, Ice Cream, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Past Child Abuse, Pining, Pre-Slash, bloodthirsty Roach, gross dead animal nonsense, horses are omnivores, monster killing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:21:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22956328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Prequel bit of the Meet Death Sitting series. Geralt keeps hanging out with the bard that wrote that song about him, and the kid keeps asking him silly questions he doesn't know how to answer.Banter, and pining, and obliviousness, is what this is mostly about.(Er, and then there's a plague, and some necrophages.)(Along Came This Song and Warmth occur between the two sections of the first chapter.)update: there is a song that goes with chapter 4!Fannishliss comes in clutch again.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: Meet Death Sitting [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 699
Kudos: 1017





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how to warn for it but a character makes a sudden, brief, offhand reference to doing survival sex work in kind of a gross way to shock another character, so brace for that if it might bug you.

Geralt really hadn’t expected to ever see the bard again, after the misadventure with the elves. He heard the song a bunch, and sort of got used to it. But it was only a matter of months later that he heard a familiar singing voice one evening, as he sidled into a tavern, hoping to get a drink before anyone noticed what he was. 

The barkeep gave him a dubious up-and-down, but sold him a mug, which was all he’d wanted. “Might be something on that notice-board for you,” the barkeep said.

“Mm,” Geralt said, and took the ale and sat down in the corner closest to the door. He’d thought about turning around and going right back out, when he heard that voice, but he made himself examine the feeling, and understood that it was no genuine instinct of avoiding trouble, it was just the part of him that worried something might be awkward. He hadn’t parted on bad terms with the kid and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he saw him again.

This audience was friendlier than the last one, and nobody threw anything at the bard. It was later, and he was mostly singing sad songs anyway. This one, Geralt had heard somewhere else, years ago, an old song-- the usual sort of thing, a girl who’d been wooed by a cad and left pregnant-- but it was a good performance. Jaskier did have a very sweet voice. Possibly too sweet for Geralt’s taste, but-- well, really, what did he know of art?

It was enough to make him smile to himself, there, warm and comfortable in the corner of the inn with a decent mug of drink, the notion that a Witcher should be some sort of critic of artistic performance. 

The rain had died down, and Geralt was going to get up and leave before the end of the bard’s performance-- he had money to stay at the inn but didn’t want to spend it-- but then somehow, improbably enough, the bard noticed him, and said “Geralt!” and everyone was looking at him. 

He sighed. “Jaskier,” he said.

“Are you here hunting monsters?” Jaskier asked eagerly.

“I _was_ just passing through,” Geralt said. “But I hadn’t checked the noticeboard yet.”

“Now I have to do the song,” Jaskier said.

“You don’t have to,” Geralt said wearily. But of course, he did, which was, as expected, moderately mortifying. Geralt sat and tried not to look embarrassed. The upside was that several people bought him ales, however, which he hadn’t expected, and that cheered him somewhat, or at least lightened him back toward neutral. 

So now he had several ales to work through, and he’d been thirsty long enough that he wasn’t going to leave them, so he sat there and drank them, and by the end of the evening when people were leaving he was rather more drunk than he’d meant to be and so he didn’t get up in time, and the bard came over and sat down next to him.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Jaskier said.

“Fancy that,” Geralt said. He still had a mug and a half of ale, so he pushed the half one over to Jaskier, who took it eagerly with an eyebrow raise of thanks. 

“People love that song,” Jaskier said. “Have they been tossing you coins anywhere?”

“Yes,” Geralt said. “It’s a nice change.”

“See?” Jaskier said, beaming. “I told you. A good song changes everything.”

“Mm,” Geralt said, noncommittal. 

“Where are you staying tonight?” Jaskier asked. “Are you staying here?”

“No,” Geralt said.

“Where?” Jaskier persisted. 

Geralt shook his head. “I was going to keep moving,” he said. “Inns are expensive and I don’t need one on a nice night like this.”

“Stay with me,” Jaskier said. “I’ve a room here.”

Somehow Geralt let himself be talked into it, and they took their last mug of ale apiece upstairs to keep talking, once Roach was comfortably settled in for a pampered indoor night. He told himself it was a worthwhile extravagance, since the kid had proved useful before. He found himself sitting in the only chair, the boy sitting on the bed, his armor in a pile by the door and, the greatest extravagance of all, his boots off and his socks washed and draped on the firescreen to dry. That alone committed him to staying here, though he’d already decided he was going to stay in the chair and not get into that bed.

The boy wanted him to get into that bed, he could tell that from the way his eyes sparkled and the scent of him. But, unlike most people who propositioned Geralt, he was being patient about it, and hadn’t made a single crude hint. Instead, he just talked. 

“I’m in love with a beautiful, important woman,” he explained earnestly, after a bit of lighter conversation, “but she won’t accept my love because I’m too young.”

“You _are_ too young,” Geralt agreed. 

“I’m not, though,” the boy said, and rolled back upright from where he’d been lounging, jacket off, shirtsleeves pushed up, shirt neck open tantalizingly. Geralt wasn’t immune, but he had good discipline, and had done rather a good job of not noticing, he thought.

“You’re old enough to shave,” Geralt conceded, “but that’s not really very old.”

“I’m old enough to sign a marriage contract and have it be legally binding,” the boy said, with a much more solemn glint in his eye.

“Whoa,” Geralt said, “maybe you’re coming on to the lady too strong.”

“No, no,” the boy said, dismissing it with an airy wave. “ _She’s_ already married, I’m not trying to marry her, I’m just trying-- anyway, no, the reason I’m out in the wilderness in the first place is that they were trying to bind me into a marriage I didn’t want, once my signature was legal, and I lit out, possibly somewhat unprepared I’ll grant, but. If I’m old enough for that--”

“Who was trying to bind you?” Geralt asked, a bit startled at his own concern. 

“Mm,” the boy said, “you don’t really want the whole story, you just got done telling me how you don’t get involved in human stuff.”

“I don’t,” Geralt said. 

“So let’s see, how can I tell you without telling you? Hm. Well, there was money in it, for relatives of mine, money and power, and they wanted that, and while I’m not entirely immune to the pull of familial duty, this woman they wanted to sell me to, hm. I mean, she was old, in her thirties at least--”

“Practically dead,” Geralt said, and Jaskier laughed; he’d been waiting for that reaction.

“The woman I love is in her thirties,” he said, “so _that’s_ not the issue, but-- how old are you?”

“Not thirty,” Geralt said.

“Tell me,” the boy said, and pouted a little. 

“No,” Geralt said. “Finish your story.”

Jaskier laughed again, and said, “Fine. So it wasn’t her age I objected to, but rather the fact that this one wanted me for _decoration but not entertainment_ , she said, and told me I’d have to keep my pretty mouth closed, and such, and you know. You know. I’ll do a lot, but--”

“I think you’d die if you kept your mouth closed for too long,” Geralt observed. And what a waste it would be, but he wasn’t going to give him that kind of encouragement out loud.

“You joke,” Jaskier said, “but,” and there was something bleak behind it. He flopped back down onto the bed, sprawling dramatically, one lithe thigh cocked upward invitingly. “I’m old enough that I’ve begun to understand that people have certain… intrinsic qualities to them, and I know this is hard to believe but I genuinely did want to be a good, dutiful son, wanted to be what was expected, wanted to be solemn and dignified and all of that shit, and there are just-- I am what I am, and I can change a little but not a lot.”

Geralt thought about his own changes, and felt he had little to add to this conversation. “Mm,” he said. 

“My point is,” the boy said, gesturing, “my point is-- my point is, truth to oneself is an important component of living a moral life.” 

“That,” Geralt said thoughtfully, “is a point with some merit.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Jaskier said. He sat up on his elbow. “So, I… well, I rendered myself unsuitable for marriage by outrageous scandal, mostly, but.” He smiled winningly, but there was something hollow behind it. “I had to flee. My family wanted to lock me up and tell everyone I’d been suffering from a curse, I think, and I decided it was best not to chance it, and made myself scarce. Which leads me back to my point,” and he sat up the rest of the way. “Which is that if I am enough of an adult to be,” and he ticked off his points on his fingers, “able to sign legally binding contracts,” another finger, “on my own in the world to fend for myself as I may,” another finger, “able to freely consent to outrageously scandalous acts--”

“It’s not that none of those things are true,” Geralt said, feeling weary and about a thousand years old, “it’s that being legally an adult may still not render you experienced enough for a powerful woman to feel she could freely have a relationship with you that wasn’t exploiting your naivete.”

“Naivete,” Jaskier said, pressing his hand to his chest in offense. 

Geralt shook his head slightly. “It’s not a bad thing, kid, it’s just--” Maybe this was a good chance to explain, actually. “When you’re old, you see someone young, you remember what it was like, you remember the stuff you didn’t know yet that nobody could tell you, and you realize it’d be terribly easy to take advantage of someone who doesn’t know that stuff yet. And you realize maybe you’re not strong enough not to take advantage like that. So you figure, better not to risk it. Draw a boundary, stick to it.”

“Plenty of other people don’t see it that way,” Jaskier said. 

“They don’t,” Geralt said, “and there’s nothing you can do about that. Sometimes all you can do is just not make it worse.”

“I’ve already learned the difference between sucking cock for fun and scandal and sucking it for food money,” the boy said, something savage glinting in his eye. “Who are you to tell me I’m too young to do it for fun? Someone else is perfectly happy to pay me to do it and hurt me besides.”

 _That_ \-- stirred something in Geralt, but not lust. “Jaskier,” he said. 

“That’s the cost of freedom,” the boy said. “The freedom to make terrible decisions along with the good ones. I don’t need to be guarded from bad things and I certainly don’t need someone deciding for me what I’m too innocent for.”

“It’s not about you being innocent,” Geralt said. “It’s not about you having done something before. It might partly be about how you seem to want to punish yourself. I know a lot about how that works, Jaskier, and I know that nothing I can tell you will change your mind about it, but I also know better than to involve myself in that kind of thing.”

He’d thought, at the beginning, that maybe there was something fey about this boy, and now he knew it, fey and feral. “Don’t you want to _save me from myself_ ,” the boy said, grinning savagely. “Doesn’t it just make you _itch_ to show me a better way?”

“Stop,” Geralt said tiredly.

“Or am I too tainted to save?” Jaskier asked. 

“That’s _not_ it,” Geralt said sharply. “Kid, don’t you talk to me about _tainted_ , you know what I am.” He stood up.

Jaskier sat up, and grabbed his mug from the table, then drained the last of it and set it back down. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. That was over the line.”

Geralt regarded him steadily for a moment, looking at the pink of his cheeks, how upset he’d gotten himself. “I think it’s time to calm down,” he said. “Talk about something safer.” And he sat back down.

“You’re right,” Jaskier said. 

They talked about more or less nothing for a little while longer, and eventually the boy fell asleep midsentence. Geralt updated his journal at the table, like a civilized person, got in a really pleasant few hours of deep meditation, and left when his socks were dry and all the ale had left his system.

_about a year later_

“Why _Roach_ , though,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt stared blankly at him, not really following. He’d been up all night not only dealing with the infestation of giant centipedes threatening the village’s crucial pasture lands, but also keeping Jaskier from getting murdered by said centipedes, and he’d told the bard to leave and the kid wouldn’t do it, and he was tired and injured and sore and sick and poisoned and horribly depleted from casting too many Signs, and just wanted some gods-damned peace. 

But. Jaskier’s nattering was keeping him from falling asleep and falling off the horse. And Jaskier had actually been helpful with the bandages, and had done some useful work helping to collect the trophies and things afterward. And it felt-- _weird_. There was a weird sort of unspooling feeling in Geralt’s head sometimes, when the kid was around, and didn’t really know why it felt so good but it felt really good just to have someone to talk to and it was stupid but he didn’t have the strength to think it through and figure out what it was. 

And he also hadn’t chased the kid off, yet.

“I mean, as a name,” Jaskier said. “Why is your horse called _Roach_.”

“Oh,” Geralt said. 

“You really don’t look so good,” Jaskier said. “Is that bandage holding?”

“It’s holding,” Geralt said. 

“We should stop and--”

“It’s _holding_ ,” Geralt said, firmer. He really wanted to get indoors before he collapsed and if they kept stopping, it wasn’t going to happen.

Jaskier stopped talking, then, and Geralt narrowed his focus down just to staying on the horse and keeping pointed toward the town.

He managed to get himself together enough to present the collection of-- well, he hadn’t gotten all their heads, but he had enough unique parts that he could prove he’d killed a fair number of the fucking things-- to the alderman, whose familiarly-mulish resistance to paying him sort of weirdly melted away. By that point, Geralt was having to keep his head tilted to figure out which of the two figures in front of him to focus on. 

Jaskier talked to the alderman for a moment as well, which-- wasn’t necessary-- but the man did hand over a sack of coins and Geralt did not count them because he wasn’t sure he could.

At some point, somehow, there was-- there must have been an inn because there was a room with a bed in it, and Jaskier pressed his back against the door and stood staring at Geralt.

“Should I get a healer?” Jaskier asked.

“No,” Geralt said sharply. Human healers sometimes were fine and sometimes were actually unscrupulous mages who wanted to cut magical trophies out of Witchers to find out how they worked, and he really did not want to have to figure out the difference at this moment, and anyway he didn’t need help, he needed time and rest. Jaskier stared at him with strangely wide eyes, and Geralt said, “I just need to rest and know nobody’s going to come in that door.”

“I can watch the door,” Jaskier said. “Do you need food?”

Yes. “No,” Geralt said, and set about pulling his armor off. He needed to check the bandages.

Jaskier didn’t say anything, but helped him, and his fingers were gentle enough at the edges of the bandages. “It’s still bleeding,” he said softly. 

“It’ll stop,” Geralt said. He couldn’t really take another healing potion. He needed to meditate, and rest. He tipped his head back, he was sitting in the chair and holding a pad of bandages to the wound, and that was good, that was fine. “Just. Watch the door? I’ll be-- hour or two.”

“In the chair?” Jaskier asked.

“Meditate, not sleep,” Geralt said. If he didn’t explain Jaskier would probably think he’d died. No end of trouble then. “Don’t-- freak out, I’m fine, just-- meditate.”

“All right,” Jaskier said uneasily. 

The last thing Geralt saw before he slid sideways into peace was that Jaskier had pulled the other chair over and set it against the door and was sitting in it. Good.

When he came to himself again there was music playing. Lute. Familiar. Ah. Bard. Right. 

Should chase him off, he’d only hurt the kid, sooner or later. 

Music was nice, though. No words, just music. It was pretty. Repetitive-- the bard was practicing something, running over a sequence of notes over and over-- but pretty.

Witchers didn’t make music, generally. Many of them, like Geralt, had their voices ruined by the Change; he’d been able to sing, as a child, and had known a few songs from the mother he barely remembered, but after the Change his voice had been hoarse, and puberty had only roughened it further until he couldn’t make any even remotely musical noises with his mouth. Well, not that he’d tried much, but it wasn’t likely to be pretty. Someone had asked one of the herb-masters about it, if it was a side effect of any of the Grasses, and the answer was that it was probably from the screaming during the Changes. Many of the candidates screamed their vocal cords bloody and then the Changes healed them in their altered, damaged shapes, was the theory.

So Geralt tried not to think about it, and didn’t think about music much, tried not to get pulled into enjoying it. He understood why people did, but such things weren’t for him.

It was some time later that Geralt really came back to awareness, to the feeling of motion in the room. Someone was standing too close-- he grabbed the arm of a person who had just touched him, and opened his eyes to look up into the frightened face of--

Oh, it was Jaskier. “What,” he said, to cover his confusion. Interior. Room. Chair. Right. Injury. 

“It stopped bleeding,” Jaskier said. “I was just-- checking-- I’m sorry to disturb you.”

He smelled of fear. Not terror, but-- more long-term fear. He’d been afraid, sitting here. Why? 

“Did someone try to come in?” Geralt asked, taking a deeper breath to come all the way out of meditation. Oh, he felt much better. He needed water, to replace the lost blood, and food, to replenish the energy healing took out of him. 

“No,” Jaskier said.

 _Then what were you afraid of_ , Geralt almost asked, but he bit down on it. It was an intrusive question. Instead he noted that there was a pitcher of water on the table, and a plate of food. Jaskier had to have gone out to get it. Normally that sort of disturbance would pull Geralt out of meditation, but. He was annoyed, slightly, because all he’d asked for was not to be disturbed, but he supposed it was irrational to expect Jaskier to just sit there in bored silence the whole time. From the scent, nobody _had_ come in the room-- it only smelled like his own blood and the poison he’d sweated out, and Jaskier’s fear, and the food, with faint traces of old presences but nobody since they’d come in.

“The alderman sent up a meal,” Jaskier said. “Said it was the least he could do, since you’d gotten hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Geralt said, attention sharpening in dread. Never let humans know you were weakened. 

“I said you’d be right as rain in no time but it was a bit of a hassle at the moment,” Jaskier said. “You heal so fast, I really can’t believe that stopped bleeding already. I’d be dead by now.”

“You would be,” Geralt said. He couldn’t really be upset. He should explain, though-- Jaskier had seen he was upset. He steeled himself, and said, “Sometimes if you show weakness humans will attack you. I don’t like to talk about getting injured.”

“These wouldn’t,” Jaskier said. 

“Never assume,” Geralt said. He studied the food, scenting carefully; there wasn’t much humans could put in food that would affect him, but he still didn’t want to find out the hard way. No spells, no poisons, no herbs. So far, so good. He drank some of the water, and carefully started off with a hunk of the bread. 

“You look so much better,” Jaskier said. “I’m afraid you were pretty visibly out of it when you were talking to the alderman. It’s part of why I spoke to him-- I think he was concerned for you.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. It made him nervous. He jerked his chin at the food. “Did you eat any?”

“No,” Jaskier said, “that’s for you, I was going to go get something once you were awake.”

Geralt shook his head. “Eat,” he said, frowning. “I can get more later if there’s not enough.” He gestured at the chair, making a come-here kind of gesture, and Jaskier looked puzzled but pulled it over to the table, and sat with him. 

“Oh wow,” Jaskier said, looking at him more clearly from across the table. “You really look a _lot_ better.”

“It’s the mutations,” Geralt explained. “It makes us heal fast. Or we’d die.” He’d drunk most of the pitcher of water already, and hadn’t really noticed but the bread he’d been holding was gone. “I’ll be back to normal by morning.”

“Good,” Jaskier said. And, very clearly, he pushed his expression back from whatever it had been to cheerful again. (What _had_ that been? Probably unnerved. Jaskier pretended very convincingly not to be unnerved but no humans liked it when Geralt mentioned mutations, Jaskier could not actually be the exception he pretended to be.) “Oh, you never answered me-- why _is_ your horse called Roach?”

“She’s my little fishie,” Geralt said, extra-flat, just to see what Jaskier would do.

Jaskier raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly. “I... see,” he said. “Oh! Here’s a question. You’re old, right?”

“Old,” Geralt said.

“Old enough to have outlived horses,” Jaskier clarified. Geralt blinked, as he realized that, well, Jaskier quite simply _wasn’t_. If he was-- twenty, twenty-three, something like that-- then even if he’d had a horse of his own for his whole adult life, it wouldn’t even be old enough to need to be retired yet. Hells, even if he’d been given a foal upon his birth, the creature could quite reasonably still be alive. 

“Yes,” Geralt said. He _was_ old. He was _so_ old. Jaskier was a literal _infant_.

“What was your previous horse called?” he asked.

“Roach,” Geralt said. He didn’t like this line of questioning. He really didn’t like to remember that Roach hadn’t always been _this_ Roach. He’d replaced her pretty recently, actually; lost the last one to a degenerating hoof condition. He’d caught it in time-- smelled it-- that he’d managed to sell her on, cheap even though she wasn’t lame yet because it felt dishonest not to explain why, to a farmer who’d promised to kill her quick when the time came she got too lame, but he wasn’t thinking about that now and he’d got this one trained up well enough that he didn’t have to think about it. The farmer was probably lying and would sell her on, passing her off as sound-- but this way, Geralt wouldn’t have to kill her himself, and wouldn’t have to think about it for years the way he sometimes did about previous horses he’d had to kill.

“Ah,” Jaskier said. “Is it a metaphor, then?”

“No,” Geralt said. “Metaphors are the ones where you say one thing and mean something else, right?”

“I, more or less,” Jaskier said. “Like, _my love’s eyes are a summer sky_ , kind of thing.”

Geralt thought for a moment about what his own eyes would be described as. Nothing good. It was exhausting. “No, it’s not a metaphor.”

“So it’s literal, then,” Jaskier said. “She is in some way literally associated with fish.”

“I’m done talking about this.” He was; it was too much talking, and he was too tired, and despite himself he was remembering the Roach who’d broken her leg. “Let’s go get more food.” He’d eaten everything on the table, somehow, except the one piece of sausage Jaskier had picked up and was still nibbling on.

Jaskier shoved the rest of the sausage in his mouth, proving he’d only taken it to be polite in the first place, and got lightly to his feet. “If you want to,” he said. 

Geralt expected he’d have to snap at the kid a couple more times to get him to shut up, but Jaskier didn’t ask him any more questions the rest of the night.


	2. 1243

He heard the boy well before he saw him, his distinctive voice raised first in exuberant speech, and later in song. Jaskier was somewhere in this neighborhood, with a group of like-minded persons, raising some sort of hell or other. It was easy enough to avoid him, and Geralt did, for several hours. 

He didn’t spend a great deal of time in cities, as monster-hunts within city limits tended to be uncommon, but he’d left Roach at a farmstead just outside the city and had already spent two days here chasing this down. There was a rumor that held that some haunting from within the city came out to the nearby settlement, or vice-versa. He had his suspicions-- some sort of vampire, he thought. Drunks were being found dead, sometimes drained of blood and sometimes beaten to death, so it was ambiguous-- the authorities thought it was the same killer, and he wasn’t convinced of that at all. But the first victim found had been unambiguously a vampire victim, out near the farmstead, in a road: something had come in from out of town, and now was either holed up in the city or traveling back and forth between the city and the outlying settlement.

More food in the city, though; Geralt thought it was mostly eating city folk. So he was checking the city street by street, focusing largely on the quarter where most of the nightlife was and where most of the bodies had been discovered. And clearly, his little friend and sometime companion was on his own reign of terror here, in which Geralt was loath to get involved. 

The noises of revelry faded and returned as the various parties wandered from place to place, and as Geralt methodically quartered and searched the neighborhood. There were multiple groups of revellers; it was some kind of festival, somebody’s feast-day or a wedding or something. Geralt didn’t know and didn’t care. 

At one point he heard music, surprisingly competent music-- drunken shouting along, but someone quite good was playing the lute, and he knew that had to be Jaskier. He had a suspicion the boy could be entirely out of his mind drunk and still be competent at playing the lute. 

It didn’t really help his search, or make it more rewarding, but it was a nice sound to hear once in a while. It was good to know the kid wasn’t dead, though from the sounds of the general merriment, it was likely to get out of hand and surely _somebody_ ’d get killed tonight. 

Whatever was beating drunks to death instead of drinking their blood wasn’t Geralt’s business, so he avoided it. 

He had enough evidence now, and knew what kind of monster this was. It was pretty clearly a katakan, not a bruxa as he’d been worried, so he knew now which potions to take. He lined them up and swallowed them neatly, then hesitated a moment before applying vampire oil to the silver sword: it was awkward to carry an unsheathed blade in the city, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Katakans weren’t the worst, but they were formidable, and if he couldn’t get the drop on the thing, it would get messy quickly. And his medallion wouldn't help, so it was all going to have to be stalking-work, and the things had absolutely superb hearing.

But as luck would have it, he found his monster in a quiet street, lurking down an alley; it had nabbed a drunk and carried him here to feed and it was pure luck that Geralt smelled the blood and could come at it over the garden wall of an occupied house. Always an easier kill if you surprised them at a feeding, though not as good as finding them in daylight-- but this one was too canny for that, he knew he'd never find it by day. It was now or never.

He killed it quickly, dropped an _Yrden_ on it and finished it off before it could even try again to go invisible. It was over surprisingly quickly, for all the preparations he’d made. Almost anticlimactic. It really hadn't been expecting him at all. 

But, too late for its victim. For a horrible moment, Geralt actually thought the fellow was Jaskier-- young, pale, dark-haired, slim, wearing brocade-- but he was a little older, dark-eyed, stubby fingers, wrong scent. He stank of fisstech, though, which at least meant he’d probably felt no pain.

Weary but uninjured, Geralt found the night guardsmen, filled out a report for them, and presented them with the murder scene. One of them gave him a written scrip to take to the authorities tomorrow, and they went to work cleaning up the mess. As Geralt had taken the claws, teeth, blood, and bone he wanted for potions already, he left them to it and went in search of something fortifying to drink.

He avoided the sound of Jaskier’s lute, and went into a different establishment, where nobody was making too much noise and everyone seemed to sort of brace themselves against the inevitable revelry. “Some kind of festival?” Geralt ventured to the barkeep.

“His Lordship’s son’s birthday,” the barkeep said wearily. “Right terrors they are, in this town.” He gave Geralt a dubious look. “Is that blood?"

“You had a little katakan problem,” Geralt said. “I took care of it, your drunks are safer now. I won’t say _safe_ , though, they seem happy to terrorize each other just fine.”

The barkeep sighed, and sold him a glass of wine, which seemed to be the drink of choice here so Geralt didn’t worry about it too much. He really wasn’t fussy. The wine was all right, the company dour enough, and he sat and drank until the adrenaline of the fight had worn off a little, and some of the bright brittle edge of sickness from the potions had eased. 

Then he left, intending on slipping out of the city to the farmstead where he’d left Roach in a pasture of beautiful clover, and had permission to sleep in the barn, himself. 

But as he made his way down the alley, there were a bluster of loud voices at the mouth of it, and among them one familiar one. “Fuck you,” Jaskier said, raw and savage, “I’m not your _whore_ ,” and then there was a dull thud of a fist hitting flesh, and then several more dull thuds, and Geralt sighed and jumped in.

He only had to pull two of the assailants, young noblemen with callow sneers, off of the pile before the rest of them noticed something was happening and scrambled back out of the scrum. 

“Gentlemen,” Geralt said into the sudden stillness, “pray tell, what the _fuck_.”

“It’s none of your business, freak,” the bravest of them hissed at him. From his pupils, he was on fisstech. From the smell, they were _all_ on fisstech. Lots of it. Which could present a danger, in terms of them being too reckless to know they were outmatched, except that Geralt was still pretty much tanked to the gills on his normal concoction of potions for a hunt with a glass of wine on top of that, so he was higher than any of them even if he hadn't been starting off with a much more dangerous baseline.

“I’ve just had to hunt and kill a vampire, to save the life of the rest of your drunks,” Geralt said boredly, “don’t take over her work for her. Kindly unhand the bard.”

“I said,” the brave idiot said, “it’s none of your _business_ , freak.”

At that juncture, Jaskier lunged to his feet and rammed the top of his head straight into the nose of the idiot, which made a sickening crunching noise, and the man fell over with a horrible muffled scream, and the other horrified onlookers leapt into frantic action. Geralt avoided the brawl by the simple expedient of grabbing Jaskier by the back of the jacket and hauling him bodily out of the scrum, throwing him over his shoulder, and leaving, post-haste. 

Jaskier struggled rather a lot more than Geralt had expected, but even without all the potions, Jaskier wouldn’t have had much chance of inflicting damage. Also, Jaskier wasn’t just drunk, he was absolutely every bit as cranked on fisstech as the rest of that crew had been.

Geralt put him down two streets over, and easily held him in place as he tried to swing wildly and keep fighting. “Jaskier, it’s me,” he said. 

“I was fine!” Jaskier said, furious. His teeth were bloody. His face was a bloody mask. “Why’d you have to involve yourself? What do you think this is?” He kept trying to punch Geralt, but he was too uncoordinated to connect, and Geralt had him pinned easily to the wall, one-handed. He wound up mostly just holding Geralt’s arm, and stopped trying to swing after a couple of inconclusive moments, blinking at Geralt instead in the darkness that was probably even more impenetrable to him than it would be at baseline because fisstech constricted the pupils.

“I think you’ve got a broken nose,” Geralt said, “and we should find where you left your lute, because you’ll be really sad if that’s gone in the morning.”

He let go of Jaskier, prepared to get lunged at, but Jaskier just lolled back against the wall and touched his face gingerly. “Nose isn’t broken,” he said. His pupils weren’t as ridiculous as the brave idiot’s had been, but he was definitely in an altered state. “Could be worse. Yeah, you’re right, I should find my stuff before those guys start really hunting for me.”

“Right,” Geralt said, a bit disconcerted by the sudden swing to agreeableness. 

“You realize that was the Duke’s son and his cronies,” Jaskier went on, “so my odds of getting arrested are quite high?”

“Ah,” Geralt said. “You mean, the one whose face you broke with your skull?”

“The very same,” Jaskier said. He pulled himself together and trotted off down the street, his direction unerring and his movements confident despite a certain reeling quality to them that pointed up how extremely intoxicated he was. 

“That’s a problem, Jaskier,” Geralt said. 

“Well, you probably shouldn’t have involved yourself,” Jaskier said. “Apologies, but he’s likely to want to blame you rather than admitting _I_ did it.” He clicked his tongue scoldingly. “Tsk. A shame. After all the work I’ve done trying to rehab your reputation.”

“I need to come back here to get paid, tomorrow,” Geralt said, exasperated. 

“Mm,” Jaskier said, turning as Geralt caught up to him. He patted Geralt on the chest. “No problem: tell them you killed me, too.”

Geralt resigned himself, and went on. He had to carry most of Jaskier’s luggage; the boy insisted on walking, but wasn’t really able to keep to a straight line after they retrieved his lute from the last inn, and his bag from the one before that, and then they had to hide from the Duke’s son’s cronies who were angrily patrolling the streets looking for them. 

But they made it out of the city. Jaskier had whispered, “Why are you hiding when you could so easily fight them?” and Geralt whispered back, “Remember how I don’t do human bullshit?” and Jaskier had just sort of hummed to himself a bit but had stayed quiet.

About halfway to the farmstead, Jaskier slowed way down and almost meandered off the road, and Geralt couldn’t help but be annoyed with him.

“At least tell me you’re not addicted to that filth,” he said. 

“Hm?” Jaskier blinked dreamily at him. “What filth?”

“Fisstech,” Geralt said. 

“I don’t think I had any of that,” Jaskier said, sounding genuinely confused.

“You absolutely did,” Geralt said, “do you think I haven’t seen it before?”

“Oh, maybe I did,” Jaskier said. “No, I’m not in the habit, but they were very persuasive.” He laughed, bitterly. “They wanted me wasted, Geralt, but they underestimated how used to functioning under the influence I am.” He visibly pulled himself together, and caught up to Geralt in the road. 

“I had noticed,” Geralt said, grudgingly, “that you seem to be able to keep up, mostly.”

“It’s a mindset,” Jaskier said. “And, I mean, years of practice. By the way, I don’t think I greeted you properly. Hello, it’s wonderful to see you, I’m so grateful you pulled me out of that fight, though I expect it wasn’t going to go the way they thought it was.”

“They were really trying to hurt you,” Geralt said. “I wouldn’t have involved myself, you’re an adult and can do what you want, but I was fairly certain they were going to kill you for sport.”

“They were,” Jaskier said, “and there were some other things they were planning on doing first. The Duke’s son is very bad news and his friends are just as bad, but. I suppose I more or less signed up for it, and didn’t really deserve a rescue, so thanks for doing it anyway.”

“Deserve,” Geralt said, a little surprised.

“I mean,” Jaskier said, gesturing broadly enough that he staggered. 

Geralt caught him by the collar and pulled him back upright. Jaskier sagged a little in his grasp, exhausted and nearly sober, and now Geralt’s potions had worn off enough that he was paying better attention and could smell how miserable the kid was, how frightened and upset and exhausted.

“I got myself into that,” Jaskier said, “and if it got me killed, well that’s my own fault. But I’m glad you involved yourself.”

Geralt kept a grip around the kid’s waist the rest of the way to the barn. “I wouldn’t let you get _murdered_ ,” he said, when he could think of how to answer. “Nobody _deserves_ to get murdered.”

“Hmm,” Jaskier said, and didn’t say anything else.

Geralt more or less threw him into the hayloft, set him up with a skin of water, meditated until dawn, and then walked back into the city. 

The captain of the guard looked at the paperwork from the night guards, looked grim, and nodded a bit. “It was a nasty business,” he said, “we’d lost a few drunks, but--”

“You’ve got another problem,” Geralt said. 

The captain gave him a wry look. “We’ve got several problems,” he said. “I heard you were involved in another altercation not long after?”

“They were attempting to beat a young man to death,” Geralt said. “I didn’t hit anyone, but there were injuries on both sides. I intervened to try to stop the fight, and removed one of the parties from the premises.”

“I believe you,” the captain said wearily, “but if anyone asks, we didn’t talk about this.”

“If the deaths keep happening,” Geralt said, “I can promise you, that was the only vampire you had in the city. I did a proper hunt, captain. If people keep dying, it’s someone human doing it.”

The captain sighed. “I know,” he said. Then, even more resigned, he said, “So don’t come back,” but he gave Geralt the money he was due, and Geralt left without any further fuss.

It wasn’t his business. 

Jaskier slept until midmorning, while Geralt re-checked the farmstead's grounds, but woke up cheerfully enough when he finally did, and the family in the farmhouse fed them both enthusiastically when Geralt confirmed the vampire that had been migrating from their farm to the city and back several times a week was dead and had been operating alone. Jaskier ate like he’d been starving for weeks, and then when Geralt asked if he had any interest in heading a little south, Jaskier professed great interest in doing so. 

So they set off southward, made a good day’s traveling, and stopped to make camp well before dark.

  
  


“Please don’t hit me,” Jaskier said, approaching rapidly enough to startle, and plopped himself down next to Geralt, far too close. “I just want to look at something quickly.”

It took deliberate effort for Geralt to hold still and not shy his head away like a startled horse as Jaskier grabbed at his neck. “What,” he said, annoyed.

“This is new,” Jaskier said, and despite the speed of his motions, his fingers were gentle on Geralt’s jaw as he bent in to look at his throat. “Sweet Melitele, that looks awful! What happened to you?”

Geralt’s heart had kicked up in speed, for some reason, and he could feel just the tips of Jaskier’s fingers as if they burned, pressing gently in against the skin of his throat, one of them directly over the pulse point there for a moment. He really-- didn’t like sudden movements toward his face. Then Jaskier delicately traced along-- something-- ah, the healing scar tissue from the striga’s claws, in a gentle, exploratory caress. 

“Something almost tore your throat out,” Jaskier said softly, horrified. “Geralt! That’s new.”

Geralt remembered himself suddenly, and growled, pulling away. “Get off me,” he said. 

Jaskier retreated judiciously. “I was wrong, it’s even worse up close. I’ve been staring at it all day thinking it couldn’t possibly be as bad as it looks, but it’s worse. What almost killed you?”

Geralt felt ridiculous, like a fresh-fucked hen fluffing her feathers after the rooster hopped off, as he shook himself off and set himself to rights, rolling the tension out of his shoulders. He _really_ didn’t like sudden movements toward his face. He had to scrub his hand over the place Jaskier had touched to make the burning awareness of his fingertips stop tingling there. “Things almost kill me all the time,” he said gruffly. 

“You must remember,” Jaskier said. “That _has_ to at least have slowed you down.”

 _I was unconscious for a full day_ , Geralt almost said, but then he thought about it, and he didn’t want to talk about it. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not telling you so you can write a song about it.”

“Why not?” Jaskier asked, but without heat. 

“Privacy concerns,” Geralt said. “She’s still alive, I don’t want her business sung about. Her almost killing me is a private matter.”

“Oho,” Jaskier said, “that sounds spicy.”

Geralt sighed. “I assure you,” he said, “it was a professional, and not a personal, private matter. I don’t have young ladies tearing my throat out over personal matters.”

“Mm if you placed one of those Wife Wanted personal ads you could use that as the tagline,” Jaskier said, sitting back as if Geralt hadn’t just almost flung him across the clearing.

“I, what?” Geralt said, distracted by the nonsense. Jaskier was good for nonsense. The kid clearly hadn’t gotten his personal life under control, but he was alive, and this was apparently his purpose: nonsense.

“Sometimes in the borderlands,” Jaskier said, “merchants find themselves without much by way of romantic prospects, so they put an advertisement in the trade periodicals. I suppose you don’t read a lot of trade periodicals.”

“My trade doesn’t lend itself to periodicals,” Geralt said. 

“You read the town noticeboards all the time,” Jaskier said. “They put them up there too, don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Geralt said, “I tend not to read the whole thing.” It was true; mostly they were depressing little insights into lives he had nothing to do with. 

“Wife Wanted,” Jaskier mused, clearly composing. “Eligible bachelor seeks partner. Six feet tall and four feet wide, ass looks great in leather. Young ladies don’t tear my throat out over _personal_ matters.” He cleared his throat. “Needs work.”

“I’m not four feet wide,” Geralt said, rather than addressing literally anything else in that nonsense. “And I’m not seeking a wife, Witchers can’t get married anyway.”

“Can’t or won’t,” Jaskier asked, with a little flourish as if this was scoring him some kind of point in some kind of game. 

Geralt didn’t really have an answer for that, so he went back to work preparing dinner. It was kind of nice having the kid around because it gave him an excuse to actually cook things, instead of just eating whatever cold and raw. Also gave him an excuse to make camp while it was still light out, because the kid couldn’t see in the dark, and while Geralt could, it was nicer to be ready before night fell. 

Mostly, he was being soft on himself for the kid’s sake, which was an extravagance but a cheap one, relatively. It was worth putting up with the nonsense, which was often intrinsically amusing anyway. 

He got the potatoes buried in the ashes by the fire so they’d roast, and Jaskier helped him fold clean leaves around the little packets of dough stuffed with the fish he’d caught and herbs he’d gathered, and they buried those too, and then they sat and Jaskier messed around with the lute a little and it was peaceful in a way Geralt wasn’t really used to.

It wasn’t peaceful like solitude, but it was still peaceful.

It didn’t last, of course. Jaskier worked through a couple of songs, no words just the lute, but then he said, “Speaking of roaches.”

Geralt frowned. “Those are trout, not roach.”

“Whatever,” Jaskier said, gesturing. He went on, unconcerned. “I’m talking about the horse anyway, it was just an awkward segue. So if Roach isn’t a metaphor, is it metonymy?” He played a little flourish, as if to accent the word.

Geralt contemplated that for a moment. “What?”

“Or synecdoche,” Jaskier said, and he sounded strangely excited. Geralt suspected he was being made fun of, as these were clearly bookish literary sorts of terms that naturally he, an ignorant sword-wielding mutant, would not know, but Jaskier sounded so purely delighted at the thought, it was hard to figure out where the mockery was.

The wise course was not to answer, so Geralt didn’t, instead pulling out his potion supplies and getting to work on the non-culinary herbs he’d collected while he was preparing for dinner. Jaskier played a little bit longer, clearly working out something in his head.

“Figures of speech,” Jaskier said finally, and set the lute down. “When you poetically refer to a thing by a signature part of it. Like calling you a hired sword, when really, they’re hiring _you_ , to _wield_ the sword, and the sword has no real, ah, not involvement, that’s not what I mean, clearly the sword’s _involved_ \--”

“I’m not a hired sword,” Geralt put in, cranky. “You say that for someone you hire for fighting. I’m hunting. It’s different.”

“Agency,” Jaskier said. “Agency. The sword has no agency.”

“And I’m not a hired sword,” Geralt said, a little more heated.

“Sorry, sorry,” Jaskier said, hands up with palms out. “Sorry! I just mean-- people hire your sword, they _do_ , I’ve heard it said. But it’s really you they’re hiring, er, _all_ of you, and your expertise at wielding the sword, and all your knowledge base about when and how to wield the sword, and so on. Likewise, ah, a hired hand, saying _hand_ to mean _man_ , that’s synecdoche because a hand is part of a man. Sword is not a part of a person, it’s a thing used by a person, so representing the person by naming the thing is metonymy.”

The only thing Geralt really understood from this was that there was no way Jaskier was making fun of him. 

“So I named my horse after a fish because… she uses fish, somehow, to do what it is that horses do?” Geralt said finally, not sure he was getting it. 

“You’re right, that doesn’t really make sense,” Jaskier said. “I meant more that she is associated with the fish somehow, poetically. But she _is_ named for the fish?”

“Yes,” Geralt said, “a roach is a kind of fish.”

“And if she’s not literally a fish, which, while I am no zoologist, I can fairly confidently say she is not, then it _is_ a poetic metaphor of some kind,” Jaskier went on. “Perhaps as simple as a simile? She reminds you of a fish in some way, she is _like_ a fish.”

“No,” Geralt said. 

“She _represents_ a fish in some way,” Jaskier said. “Her coloring-- well, no-- or the quality of her movements are somehow fish-like?”

“No,” Geralt said. 

“I’m really not getting anywhere with this at all,” Jaskier said. 

“You are not,” Geralt confirmed. Having made a paste of the herb mixture, he scraped it out into a bowl and added some of his carefully-hoarded pure alcohol to it to make a tincture, and then set it aside to macerate, then went and scrubbed out the mortar with twigs and water. 

“Can you just tell me?” Jaskier demanded.

“I could,” Geralt allowed. “But here’s the thing. It’s not that interesting and it’s not that funny, and this?" He gestured vaguely towards Jaskier. "Is both, so, I think I won’t.”

“Argh,” Jaskier said, and collapsed dramatically backward off the log he’d been sitting on.

“I hope you checked for ants before you did that,” Geralt said, unperturbed, as he set to grinding the next herb to paste. 

“Yeargh,” Jaskier said, and flailed his way back upright, dusting himself off. 

“Dinner will be ready soon,” Geralt said. “It’s getting dark. You could cut some pine branches for bedding, if you wanted to distract yourself.” He seldom bothered with such things for himself, but Jaskier naturally would feel the cold and damp more, and with two it would be hardly any work. 

“I haven’t a sturdy enough knife for that sort of-- _aagh_!” Jaskier protested. Geralt pulled one out and threw it at him, neatly putting it into the bole of a tree, and really there was plenty of distance-- arm’s length-- so there was no reason for Jaskier to be so alarmed about it, but it was entertaining. 

“Quit being such a baby,” Geralt said, greatly amused, and then set aside his herb-work to retrieve the knife when it was sunk too deeply into the tree for Jaskier to get it out.

“Listen,” Jaskier said, “I’m a poet, not an outdoorsman.”

“You’re outdoors now,” Geralt said. He paused, and frowned. “I thought you were a bard.”

“I am,” Jaskier said. But he looked pleased with himself. “But I had my first book of poetry published this past winter, so I get to call myself a poet too, now.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. He didn’t know anything about poetry. If poets made money, Jaskier wouldn’t be wandering around in the wilderness much longer. But he had a sneaking suspicion poets didn’t make a lot of money. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “None of the poems are about me, are they?”

“Why would I write poems about you?” Jaskier asked.

“I don’t know,” Geralt said, “but you wrote a song about me, so I feel I have to watch my back.”

Jaskier laughed. “Mostly they were love-poems,” he said. “I think you’d know if you’d given me any reason to write you love-poems.” He batted his eyelashes, and gave Geralt a pleading look. Geralt was unmoved until Jaskier caught his red, red lower lip between his teeth and made an inviting movement of his eyebrows, and then he had to look away, pretending disgust.

He got out another knife and went and cut pine branches, since Jaskier was making very little headway on it. “How many of these poems are about the thirtysomething-year-old lady you were in love with, or have you moved on?”

“Oh,” Jaskier said, “most of them were about her. They worked, too, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh good,” Geralt said. “I’d hate for you to waste away.”

“It was quite difficult for me to tear myself away to go back out on the road this summer, I’ll have you know,” Jaskier went on. From the sound of it, he was actually doing _some_ work, of some sort, though it was nearly impossible to tell what. “But, I thought, absence has a way of improving affection, surely, especially in someone as, hm, _concentrated in dosage_ as myself--”

Geralt snorted semi-accidentally, and Jaskier went on, sounding smug-- he’d set that up, the bastard, to get a reaction-- “so my going away was really only in service of my eventual triumphant return. Or so I hope. We’ll see if she has missed me when I come back.”

“I’m sure she has,” Geralt said. 

“Also her husband spends the summers with her,” Jaskier said, “and it seemed politic for me to-- _aaugh!_ ”

Geralt had just stepped out from behind a tree to give Jaskier a disapproving look at the tidbit about the husband, and Jaskier was between him and the fire. Jaskier, looking at him in the gloom of the woods, shrieked and dropped whatever branches he had, and went scrambling backward into the clearing, tripping over himself. 

“Oh for _fuck’s_ sake,” Geralt said, following him.

Jaskier flailed backward almost into the fire, and finally recognized Geralt. “What the fuck,” he said. 

Geralt knew exactly what had happened. The firelight had caught his eyes, and in the dark that was all Jaskier had seen of him. “It’s just me, you dim shit, I was standing there the whole fucking time,” he said, a little more viciously than he meant to, but it never put him in a good mood when a companion was horrified to incoherence by some aspect of his fundamental physical self. 

He dumped the branches down onto the ground, and went back to retrieve the ones Jaskier had dropped in his sudden terror. 

“It’s just you,” Jaskier said faintly, gathering himself. “Holy sh-- the light caught your eyes so strangely, you looked like a wolf or something.”

“I _am_ a fucking wolf,” Geralt said, really grumpy now. 

“No but like you had, what’s that called, ah, tapetum lucidum, oh yeah-- eyeshine,” Jaskier said. “What a strange illusion.”

“I _do_ have eyeshine,” Geralt snarled. 

“You do not!” Jaskier said, astonished.

Geralt growled in annoyance, but stepped back into the shadows and crouched to turn and look at the fire from Jaskier’s level.

“Oh holy _fuck_ ,” Jaskier said, “you _do_ , that is _fucking awesome_ , how did I never notice that?”

“I don’t know,” Geralt said. “For a poet, you’re not terribly observant.” He stalked out of the shadows and went and kicked the branches into some semblance of order. 

“I’ve never seen that before!” Jaskier protested. “Is that something that comes and goes or is it always like that?”

“Lilit’s _tits_ ,” Geralt said, marveling, “how are you this stupid? You can only see it in the dark, idiot.”

“I’ve seen you in the dark before,” Jaskier said.

“At particular angles,” Geralt said. “I’m finished talking about this, I suggest you move on before I make you move on.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Jaskier said, and they went to dig their food out of the ashes. 


	3. 1244

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is unrelated but I'm going to put in a plug here, since it wouldn't have gone out as an email to anyone subscribed-- I was fixing typos in the first installment of this series as I was distracting myself while doing edits on this chapter here [take a wild guess which super obvious plot hole i didn't notice until i was about to hit post on this?], and realized that Meet Death Sitting was missing almost 2000 words from the beginning of its final chapter? So I encourage you to go check that out, if you've already read that story. It's just a missing scene that somehow slipped through the cracks. Geralt meditates and Jaskier and Ciri are goofy about it. [Meet Death Sitting Revised Chapter 8](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22572403/chapters/54388579)  
> OK back to your regularly scheduled backstory content.

  
  


“Geralt!” A man’s voice, echoes ringing sharp off the close walls of the surrounding houses.

He reined Roach to a pause and turned warily. People who knew his name were a mixed bag. He’d only stopped in town for provisions; he was on a contract out in the countryside, and wanted to get on with it. 

In a moment, the speaker revealed himself, hopping through a doorway on one foot as he pulled on his other boot: Jaskier, and Geralt felt his shoulders loosen. He hadn’t seen the bard yet this season and had half-worried the kid was dead, but then he hadn’t been looking, of course. At any rate, of all the potential people who’d know him on sight well enough to call out, this was probably the best option. 

“Geralt,” Jaskier said, coming up to him. He looked good, looked sober and cheerful and like he’d been eating, and not sleeping in ditches. “I saw you from the window and was trying to get out here before you vanished. Did you see, on the notice-board, there’s a pretty interesting-looking job?”

“I’m on a job,” Geralt said. 

“Some sort of hideous monster in a cave,” Jaskier said. “It sounds fascinating.”

Geralt considered it. “I’m on _that_ job,” he said. “Is the notice still up?”

“Oh, probably not,” Jaskier said. “What is it? What’s the monster in the cave?”

Geralt sighed. He’d already spent two days reconnoitering the countryside. “It’s just a chort, probably,” he said. 

“What’s a chort?” Jaskier asked. 

Geralt sighed again. He could see where this was going. “It’s boring,” he said. “But dangerous, maybe.”

Jaskier grinned. “So I’m coming with you.”

“You’re not coming,” Geralt growled. 

“Come on,” Jaskier said. “You know it’s always more fun with me there, and have I gotten in the way ever? No? I’m good at this.”

“No,” Geralt said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I can even be useful,” Jaskier said. “Here, look how laden Roach is! You could leave your extra gear behind in my room here, I’ve a sturdy door with a lock and I know the proprietor.”

That _was_ tempting. It was only a couple of hours there and back, and a fair day with no rain-scent in the wind. Geralt could leave behind his camping gear, his wet-weather gear, all the extra food and potion supplies he had to lug around-- easily thirty pounds of bullshit that Roach didn’t need to be carrying, all the way out there and back. And, the offer carried with it a tantalizing possibility of not having to sleep outdoors tonight. Which was luxury he didn’t need, but was nice to contemplate. Even if it was just meditating in a chair or on a floor, it was always pleasant to get out of the dew and the damp, and Jaskier had proven himself a not-obnoxious bed companion on prior occasions. 

“Come on,” Jaskier said, jerking his head back toward the door he’d run out of, and turned and walked away. 

Geralt sat a moment, bargaining with himself. The kid was being obnoxious, but. It was probably just a chort, or at worst a fiend, and he could leave the bard with Roach and they’d be safe enough. And then the trip out and back would be more entertaining, as well. 

Fine. He sighed at himself, and put his heel to Roach’s side, turning her to follow Jaskier back to his lodging house. 

  
  


“You have to stay out here,” Geralt said. “Not only is it dangerous, you also can’t see, so there’s no point even going in for research.”

“You’re not going to take a torch or something?” Jaskier peered into the cave. They were under the overhang of the cliff, and the light was dim, but the cave yawned pure black in the hillside.

“No,” Geralt said. “How the hell am I going to sneak up on something while on fire?”

“Then how will you see?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt looked at him. Jaskier gestured. “OK, seeing in the woods on a dark night is one thing but that’s actual total darkness in there.”

Fair. Geralt rummaged in his satchel until he found the Cat. “This,” he said. 

“I have been meaning to ask you what’s in those little bottles,” Jaskier said, leaning in to look. It was dim in here, dim enough Geralt thought that a human should have trouble seeing, though he wasn’t ever quite sure. 

“Poison,” Geralt said. 

“You’re going to kill yourself to avoid the task,” Jaskier said flatly, raising an eyebrow. His pupils were huge, just a thin ring of iris around them, and it made his eyes look bigger. 

Geralt grunted at him in annoyance. “Poison to you,” he said. He uncorked the Cat, swallowed it, and carefully rewrapped the bottle and put it back into the satchel. He was low on spares. 

“I wasn’t going to drink any,” Jaskier said. “Fine, don’t tell me what they do.”

“They do this,” Geralt said, as he felt it taking effect. He closed his eyes for a second, and then opened them, and Jaskier was standing too close to him so when he opened his eyes he was only inches from the bard’s face.

“Holy fuck,” Jaskier swore, hopping backwards a little. 

Geralt wasn’t sure what he looked like, but he was sure it was horrifying. Maybe this would scare the kid off, finally. He took a drink of water, since he had a moment, and said, “So your best bet is to take Roach and wait outside, there’s nothing to see in here anyway.”

“Fine, fine,” Jaskier said, reluctantly retreating toward the horse.

Geralt climbed down farther into the cave. He wanted to scout now, in broad daylight, to make absolutely sure it was the fairly straightforward fiend he thought it was. If so, he might find it sleeping, and could perhaps kill it before it woke. If it was something else, which-- the tracks were fairly muddled, so he actually wasn’t entirely sure-- he’d be able to slip back out once he had the full details, and go make his report. Likely, he could just kill the thing and get it done, he was thinking, as he climbed silently farther down into the cave.

It took him precisely a minute and a half to determine that, no, absolutely not, he could not handle this. It was not a fiend, as he’d been led to expect; it was not a chort, as he’d half-thought it might be, as people got them confused so often. It was a mated _pair_ of chorts, with a nest of young, and he’d never even _seen_ chort young before because only an idiot would go after the things in mating season. Which it _wasn't_ , it was absolutely _not_ mating season for these guys, but the evidence of his eyes was unmistakable: that was a pair of chorts, and a litter of young. 

He considered it for a second, working out strategies, but as he was envisioning the way two chorts could maul him in collaboration, one of them snorted and turned over in its sleep. Which made him contemplate the fact that he did not want to die, not right now, not right here. 

He climbed back out as quietly as he could, and stood a moment in the cave. “Well, fuck,” he said to himself. With the Cat potion still in effect, as it would be for some time, he couldn’t go outside. It was a bright sunny day with nary a cloud, and he’d be in agony.

Jaskier was out there somewhere, with Roach; he could smell them, and could hear the bard singing to himself. Or, singing to Roach, really. 

He opened his satchel and thumbed through his potions. A White Honey would cancel out the Cat. Expensive mistake, but perfectly reasonable. 

Only problem was, he didn’t have a White Honey in this satchel. 

_Fuck_. He thought back, to unpacking his things in Jaskier’s room. He’d very carefully selected out the things he’d thought he’d need, considering himself very resourceful for remembering to include an extra healing potion in case whatever it was got the drop on him, and a nice double helping of strength and endurance enhancers, and a spare Cat because he knew there was a cave, and… in his mind’s eye, he held the White Honey for a moment, looked at it, and set it aside with the Black Blood and the other really toxic shit he normally used it to recover from.

Fuck. Fuck fuck _fuck_.

He dug in his satchel for a handkerchief or a scarf or something, maybe a spare shirt, he could sort of blindfold himself with maybe, but he didn’t have anything particularly suitable on him. All that stuff was in the saddlebag on Roach, that… he’d left behind in the room. _Maybe_ he had a handkerchief. He’d only brought a minimal medical kit with him, and not so much as a change of clothes.

Fuck. He was an idiot.

Well, nothing for it but to sit here and wait, then. Cat generally lasted about, mm, an hour or so. So he had, hm. About fifty-five minutes to kill before he’d be able to navigate, outdoors.

He sat down and leaned his back against the wall and listened to Jaskier work through a series of rhyming couplets about Roach’s dazzling complexion. It was a nice distraction from thinking endlessly about what a fucking idiot he was.

It had been somewhat less than a minute when he heard a scrabbling noise. He froze, and listened for a moment. It was coming from the mouth of the deeper part of the cave. Oh, it was definitely coming from the back of the cave. It was coming from the nest of chorts. It was, in fact, a baby chort, identifiable by the small(ish) footsteps and high(er)-pitched breathing. 

He had two choices: run away, or kill it. If he killed it, the parents would smell the blood. If he ran away, it would hear him and chase. If he did not kill it and did not run away, it would smell _him_ , and come after him. As he dithered, easing himself to his feet, he heard it also freeze: it had smelled him. 

Fuck. 

They both stood frozen for a moment, and then the little chort let out a low growly _yawp_ noise. 

Several little _yawp_ noises echoed back, at varying distances.

Fuck. Geralt stood perfectly still, gathering himself. 

Then the thing charged. Geralt got his sword out just in time and cut it down, because it was that or it would kill him, but then he turned and ran because that was going to rouse all the rest of them. 

“Jaskier,” he shouted, “get on Roach, just go, we have to go, _run_!”

It was like being stabbed in the eyes-- no, clubbed in the face. He couldn’t even see Jaskier. He ran blindly, and he could hear that Jaskier had hastily grabbed up several objects and had actually managed to get on Roach and that was great, but Geralt wasn’t sure where he was in relation to the horse and he had his arm over his eyes and was trying to peer at the ground as he ran and it wasn’t great, he wasn’t good at this. Even with his eyelids fully closed it was agonizingly bright out here.

“What-- did something--” Jaskier’s voice was distracted, and shaky, but moving. Good. 

“Go,” he said, and tripped over a fucking-- something, a rock. He scrambled up and staggered onward, and heard one of the Chortlings coming up behind him. Fantastic. He spun around, squinting, and could just make it out well enough to fling an _Igni_ at it, and then he turned and ran again and within three strides had tripped on something else he couldn’t properly see and had to pick himself up again. Fuck, he was going to _die_. He scrambled to his feet, absolutely fucking blind, and turned at bay, trying desperately to squint enough that he could make out whatever was coming after him. You couldn’t kill chorts with Signs, they were a lot tougher than that. He was _fucked_. He couldn’t fight two in the best of circumstances, and absolutely couldn’t fight one in the shape he was in now, and apparently the little ones were big enough to be aggressive. If he’d stood his ground in the cave he’d already be dead.

Roach came up next to him and Jaskier grabbed his arm.

“Get up, get up,” Jaskier said, “come on,” and between the two of them he managed to get onto the horse behind Jaskier but his feet weren’t in the stirrups, Jaskier’s were, so he was going to have to steer. 

Geralt covered his face with his hands, and Jaskier said “Oh, I see them now, holy-- what the fuck--”

“Go,” Geralt said, and they went. They had a chance; Roach was faster than a chort on the open ground like this.

They made it to the road and kept going at a pretty good clip for a while. Jaskier said, “Did one of them get you in the face? How bad is it?”

“No,” Geralt said, “I’m fine, I’m--”

“I’ve never seen you move like that,” Jaskier said. 

“I’m fine,” Geralt said, but then added, “Are they still coming?”

“I don’t know,” Jaskier said, “but they were terrifying as fuck so I’m going to keep going.”

“It’s-- it’s a mated pair, with young,” Geralt said, “I don’t have near enough of anything to take on that much. Gonna have to go back with help, or turn it over to the authorities and some mages or something. Not a job for a lone Witcher at all.” He peeked out around the side of his hand, but the light was still stabbing him. “Ow, fuck,” he hissed.

“Really, what’s wrong?” Jaskier asked. “You’re definitely hurt.”

“The Cat potion,” Geralt grumbled. 

“The what?” Jaskier asked. He wasn’t actually a bad rider, Geralt had to admit; obviously used to a less high-strung mount, but Roach was behaving for him, probably because she was so busy running away from whatever was behind them. 

“The potion,” Geralt said, “lets me see in the dark. But it takes an hour or so to wear off. I can’t make it stop. I can’t fucking see out here, Jaskier.”

“Oh dear,” Jaskier said. Geralt braced himself to be made fun of, but it didn’t come.

After a while, Jaskier slowed Roach, and they made their way off the road. Geralt could smell forest, could smell dappled shade, a stream, roof thatch, buildings, livestock. In a moment Roach hesitated, then her hoofbeats were muffled; they were inside a building or structure.

“It’s not much,” Jaskier said, “but we’re in a barn now. Hang on, I think the door closes.”

He slipped off the horse, and Geralt got down as well, holding on to the stirrup. He squinted; it was still bright, but there was a heavy creak, and Jaskier made a noise of effort and in a moment the light went away.

It was such a blessed relief. Geralt actually groaned and pried his eyes open. He had _such_ a headache. 

“Better?” Jaskier asked. Geralt could see him trying to make his way back from the door, shuffling carefully with his hands out; his eyes hadn’t adjusted, and it was fairly dark in here. There was a window on the other end, or-- no, it was a hole, where part of the roof had fallen in. But it wasn’t bad. 

Geralt went over. “I’m right here,” he said, and took Jaskier’s arm before he could trip on anything. “Thank you. Here, come sit.”

He helped Jaskier sit on an old crate, and then prowled around the barn a moment, for something to do and to make sure nothing was nesting in here. He watched Jaskier, and after a few moments the kid’s eyes adjusted somewhat, and he peered around as well. “I guess it’s not that dark in here,” Jaskier said.

“No, I’d be able to see without the Cat,” Geralt said. “But I _can_ see _with_ it, which is a blessed relief.”

“Does that happen often?” Jaskier asked.

“No,” Geralt said. “I don’t-- usually I’ve done my prep work better than that and I know what I’m getting into. Stupid, rookie mistake to make.” He shook his head. “And there’s a-- I can take another potion, that makes the Cat stop working, but like a fucking idiot, I didn’t bring any of that one with me. It’s sitting in my other saddlebag back in your room.”

“Oh, fuck,” Jaskier said.

“Yeah,” Geralt said. He was really angry at himself, now that he had time to be. “Fucking _stupid_. Stupid shit like that is how you get yourself _dead_.”

“Mm,” Jaskier said. “Well, you made it, though, so--”

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t fucking _stupid_ of me,” Geralt snarled, pacing away. 

“What were those things?” Jaskier asked, after a moment.

“Chorts,” Geralt said. “And the thing is, I can handle a chort, it’s really not that bad, but that was two, with young, and--” He shook his head. “It’s not chort mating season! I don’t know what the fuck they were doing.”

“Maybe they just got a late start?” Jaskier asked.

“It’s a problem,” Geralt growled. “But it would explain why the villagers have been having trouble. Those two would’ve been aggressive while they were preparing for that nest. Now we’ve riled them up. Fuck!”

To work off some of his nervous energy, he climbed up into the hayloft and checked for bird nests or traces of any other beasts. Just pigeons. It was brighter up here, so he dropped back to the floor and prowled the corners of the building. Abandoned at least three years, maybe five, not longer. Chorts had probably moved in because there were fewer people around. 

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Jaskier asked. He was-- oh, he was taking care of Roach, unsaddling her and letting her cool off.

Geralt helped stow the tack and took her lead, walked her up and down the aisles of the barn to cool her. She’d run hard, and stopping short would make her stiffen up. Gods, Geralt was being an idiot all around; now he was neglecting his horse. What a fucking idiot. He growled, and kept moving.

“I’m fine,” Geralt said, when Jaskier kept staring at him. “It’s fine.”

Pacing with Roach was better. He could stroke her neck and murmur to her and be distracted. After a little bit, Jaskier got out his lute and started to mess with it, and it was pleasant, actually, to walk in the soft darkness and listen to music. A distraction, from how fucking stupid he was and what a dumb mistake all of that had been.

Some of the hay in the loft was still good, so once Roach was mostly dry, Geralt climbed back up and tossed a pile of it down for her, and she munched desultorily at it while Jaskier fiddled and Geralt sat in the hayloft looking at the hole in the roof and cleaning his sword. 

Finally he felt like the sunlight through the roof hole wasn’t burning him, so he stalked over there and poked his head out. His eyes, blessedly, adjusted. 

He turned and climbed back down to the barn floor, startling Jaskier out of a musical reverie. “Eyes are better,” he said gruffly. “We can go.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said, “but I was just getting comfortable.” He sighed, stood and stretched, slightly invading Geralt’s personal space to do so, then looked up and patted him on the chest. He wasn’t that short, actually-- Geralt thought of him as a small person but he was only a couple of fingerwidths shorter than he himself was, if much slighter. “Mm, your eyes do look much better.” And he turned to put his lute back in its case.

Geralt had mastered his overwhelming annoyance at himself by now, and realized what was missing. So he stood there a moment, took a breath, steadied himself, and said, “Thanks for the quick thinking back there. You saved my ass.”

Jaskier went still for a moment, then turned and blinked owlishly at him, as if waiting in wariness for some punchline. Geralt braced himself for the bard to get obnoxious now, and Jaskier’s mouth did open, chest inflating, but then he subsided, letting all that breath out quietly. “You’re welcome,” he said simply. “I’m glad I was able to help.”

And that was that. They went back to town, and Jaskier had written an extremely colorful and wildly inaccurate little ditty about how much more dangerous a family of fiends was than a single one ("but _a family of fiends_ alliterates," he had explained when Geralt had tried to correct him), and even though Geralt had now wasted three days on this job he couldn’t do by himself, at least the local baron gave him a finder’s fee for his accurate reporting.

“There was a job three towns back,” Jaskier said, “that looked _perfect_ , that was when I started looking for you. Let’s go see.”

  
  


_________

  
  


“-- all the ice cream I could eat,” Jaskier finished.

Geralt grunted. “What’s _ice... cream_?” he said finally, because he couldn’t make the two words combine in any meaningful way.

He heard a rustle. Jaskier sat up.

They were in a barn hayloft, the only place to stay in this… it wasn’t even a village, it was just a farmstead. It was pissing down rain, and had been raining for days, and they were just lying in the barn even though it was midafternoon because it was too wet to go anywhere. Roach was in the barn, below, happy and dry and eating hay. They were up here in their smallclothes with everything they owned hung up on ropes strung across the rafters, dripping, because everything they owned was soaking wet. And they were going to stay here until they dried out.

The farmer had been apologetic, but Geralt really didn’t mind not being in the house. There were more children than rooms. There were more children than cows. There were _so many_ children. 

At least there was some food, though not much of it. Geralt had caught and eaten several rats by the grain bins, though he’d done so without letting Jaskier see-- but it meant he didn’t need much of the human-palatable food. There was plenty of water, at least. They couldn’t have a fire but it was warm enough in here, with all the hay and several horses and cows giving off body heat downstairs. It was getting late in the season, and Geralt knew it was about time for him to part ways with the bard and find someplace to hole up. He might go home, back to Kaer Morhen, this year. Jaskier had somewhere he always went in winter but Geralt had never asked, didn’t plan to.

“You don’t even know what ice cream _is_?” Jaskier said, sounding as if this were tragic.

“I’m an animal,” Geralt said boredly. An animal who ate rats, still twitching, for dinner. He’d fed the guts and skins and paws to Roach, who’d enjoyed them along with the grain the farmers were nice enough to let her have, though she’d left the tails. This Roach was a little bloodthirstier than the last, more like the original one who’d earned the name. 

Jaskier proceeded to explain what ice cream was-- apparently, you whipped a lot of air into a concoction of eggs, sugar, and cream, and then froze it while churning it so the air was in it, so it was fluffy and very cold and very sweet, and Geralt supposed it was good (mostly, it sounded _expensive_ ) but he hadn’t eaten a lot of sweets in his life and had a suspicion mostly he’d notice the flavors of whatever was in the water that had made the ice you used to freeze it. That was his experience, always picking up on the flavors of things nobody else noticed.

(The rats had tasted of grain. They’d been quite fat. He wasn’t fond of the flavor of rat, it had a kind of musky ammonia to it that was unpleasant in all ways, but. Their bodies were made of meat, same as the bodies of most things. He didn’t mind them; they were acceptable sustenance.)

“I would eat it every day if I could,” Jaskier finished.

“Mm,” Geralt said.

“Your turn,” Jaskier prompted. He’d suggested this game, to pass the time. Figured he’d want to talk. But there wasn’t much choice; he couldn’t play his lute, his other fallback, because it was so humid the strings just wouldn’t hold a tune. 

Geralt sighed. It _was_ his turn to talk, so he had to come up with something.

“One time I was in this village,” Geralt said, a little dreamily, “and there was no inn, but a farmer’s wife let me sit in her kitchen, and she made me these dumplings, and they were full of mutton and onions and just a little cabbage I think, and they were boiled and then fried in fat, and those were the best thing I have ever eaten.”

“That _does_ sound good,” Jaskier said. 

“Mm,” Geralt said. The mutton had been good, from a healthy young wether; the fat had been a mix of pork lard and rendered sheep tail, the dough had been ever so slightly leavened, just a bit puffy but also stretchy and toothsome. He wasn’t going to get into all that. “I could eat _that_ every day.”

They were quiet a moment contemplating that, but then Jaskier lay back down and said, “Okay, but what about the rest of it?”

“The rest of what,” Geralt said. 

“The question,” Jaskier said. “It wasn’t just what would you eat. It was if you could have anything.”

“Oh,” Geralt said. Yes, Jaskier had led with that-- various wishes for renown, power, sex, and Geralt hadn’t paid much attention until the food, because he really couldn’t relate. He sighed, yawned, and finally said, “Fine. If I could have whatever I wanted in the world, what would I do? I would…” He contemplated. People sometimes asked him what he wanted, and he never knew what to answer. He wanted things to be okay. He wanted to have enough to eat. He wanted not to have to hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. He wanted things-- peace, answers, resolution, for horrible things in the past not to have happened-- but nothing anyone could give him. 

“Ah,” he said, finally, thinking of something. “I would take a hot bath, with soap, _every single day_.”

“That’s not good for your skin,” Jaskier said. “Even really rich nobles don’t take a bath _every_ day.”

“I’m a fucking _mutant_ ,” Geralt said. “I’ll grow new skin, I don’t care. I might be improved by it, it’s not like the skin I have is in any way nice at all.” And he raised an arm, turning it to look at the slashmarks, the claw scars, the bite marks, the burns marring the surface of the skin.

“You really like baths, huh?” Jaskier said.

“I _hate_ the smell of myself,” Geralt said, surprising himself with how intense it came out. “I would take a bath every day, and have all clean clothes every day, and everything I wore would be washed in hot water, good soap, and dried in the sun every time I wore it, and I would never _ever_ wear a shirt twice without washing it.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said. “Well, fair. I would love to be able to change clothes more than I do out on the road like this. And yes, I’d wash every day if I had the chance, but I wouldn’t take a whole bath.”

“I smell of death,” Geralt said, “all the time.”

“You kill things all the time,” Jaskier said reasonably.

“It’s not that,” Geralt said. “If I take a bath, and put on a clean shirt, and go to bed on clean sheets, by the time I wake up in the morning I already smell just a little bit of death, and if I break a sweat for any reason by the time it dries it’s all I can smell. Death. I hate it.”

Jaskier sat up on an elbow again. “I hate to think what I must smell like to you, then,” he said.

“You smell fine,” Geralt said absently. “You just smell like a human.”

“Huh,” Jaskier said, perturbed, and Geralt remembered that his sense of smell was strange to humans and he tried generally not to let on about it. Right. “Well, for what it’s worth, I mostly just think you smell like horse.”

“That’s on purpose,” Geralt mumbled.

“What?” Jaskier sat up even farther. 

“I’d rather smell like horse than like me,” Geralt said. “If I can’t properly do laundry I’ll rinse things out and then let them dry on Roach’s haunch while I’m riding so it smells like her instead of me.”

He shouldn’t have admitted that, it was weird. But it helped, and it was the only thing that helped. It was worse if he’d been taking potions; his sweat came out so rank and toxic that even washing didn’t help. Only the scent of horse could eventually drive it out. Sometimes he put particularly foul garments between the saddle pad and saddle and rode like that, because his own dirty laundry was so disgusting to him. 

“Is that a Witcher thing?” Jaskier wondered. 

“Sense of smell? Yes,” Geralt said.

“No, finding one’s own scent upsetting,” Jaskier said. “I mean, I know what it’s like to be offended by your own odor, but it usually takes me a couple of days or some really hard living.”

“Other Witchers don’t smell this bad,” Geralt admitted. “And they don’t seem to think I smell so bad, but. Maybe they’re just being nice.”

“Are Witchers usually nice to each other?” Jaskier asked. 

This was a lot of talking. “No,” Geralt said. “We’re not nice people.” He sat up. Enough talking. He could hear another rat gnawing at the wall, below. The least he could do was to exterminate all the rats in these nice people’s barn. He rolled to his feet, picked a single steel knife out of his spread-out gear, and went down the ladder, barefoot and nearly naked, because it was pouring rain and nobody was doing any outdoor work today so it didn’t matter.

When he came back, Jaskier was asleep. He smelled good, and he smelled of sex, and Geralt realized he’d taken advantage of the privacy to avail himself of the most sure-fire remedy for boredom ever invented: masturbation. It smelled _so_ good, and Geralt sat on the ladder at the edge of the hayloft, breathing it and fighting the urge to go over and shove his nose into the crook of the young man’s neck. He smelled _delicious_ , young and healthy and human and male and, crucially, _familiar_ , Geralt was _used_ to him now.

It was too much. Geralt thought about leaving, taking all his gear and just leaving the kid asleep here, but it was still raining and he could smell it was going to snap to cold in a day or two. So he went down and sat with Roach instead, until eventually Jaskier came down and joined him, smelling a bit less of sex but just as delicious, rumpled and sleepy and comfortable and sweet.

As soon as the rain was done, Geralt thought, they’d part ways. They had to. He couldn’t put up with this. 


	4. 1245: Contagion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on this chapter a while and didn't mean for it to be topical. But uh. TWs, then: there's a contagion, and Geralt's hired to deal with the necrophages, but also has to deal with the inevitable fallout of a plague in the countryside... and Jaskier's with him, and not immune.
> 
> I'm consoling myself that the fantasy of someone Dealing With This is comforting. But please, take care of yourselves. And, for the first time in this series, the chapter ends at a scene break, but not at the resolution of the plot, so there's sort of a cliffhanger.  
> Specific TWs in notes.  
>  **update:** If you want, there is a very beautiful and consoling song that goes with this, thanks to Fannishliss. [A lullaby Jaskier wrote for the occasion.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23145886)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings:  
> Illness, contagion, suspense over contracting illness  
> Death, child death, child harm, child abandonment  
> A neurodivergent child suffers neglect (unwittingly)  
> [further TW: I describe a girl with Down's Syndrome and attendant cognitive/linguistic impairment as "simple" because I think that's likely how the POV character would classify her; he treats her compassionately, however, and I am sorry if any details of that seem wrong; I intend it to be a broadly neutral-to-positive portrayal of a background character]
> 
> Government mismanagement of a public health crisis! [bitter laughter forever]
> 
> For the record, I'm basing the symptoms and contagion mechanism on typhoid fever, which is a real thing and for which you can be vaccinated but not very effectively. I briefly considered smallpox, which does exist in Witcher canon, but decided against it; you're welcome.

Geralt read the notice board with a growing sense of suspicion. There was a lot of work for a Witcher here, and rewards guaranteed by the regional government. And the work was almost entirely necrophages. The descriptions were vague, but almost every one of these creatures was easily enough diagnosed as an eater of the dead. Why would there be so many dead, and why-- 

Well, it was obvious, and Geralt cursed out loud and strode over to the table where Jaskier was just finishing a mug of ale. 

“What?” the bard asked, looking up at him over the rim of the cup. Of the local brew. Which he’d just finished drinking. Into his body.

Too late. It was too late. Geralt bit back what he’d been about to say, and sat down at the table instead. He breathed in and let it out slowly, before he leaned forward to say quietly, “All the jobs are necrophages.”

“Necrophages,” Jaskier said thoughtfully, clearly picking the word apart. “Eaters of the dead.”

“Yes,” Geralt said. “There are a lot of them. Why do you think that might be?”

“A lot of dead people about?” Jaskier guessed sensibly. He frowned. “No war on, though.”

“No,” Geralt said grimly. He should have looked at the board first. Stupid, _stupid_ , but then-- it wasn’t something that would affect him, he’d never had to be wary of it and so never particularly worried. 

Jaskier reached the conclusion, quickly enough, and paled, looking up at Geralt with wide eyes. “Contagion,” he said.

“We can’t stay here,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier looked at the cup he’d just drunk, at the food they’d both eaten. “Ah,” he said. 

Not all contagions worked by the same mechanism, but a lot of them lived in the water. The beer might have enough alcohol in it to kill the contagion, but then again it might not. And the food, well. Heat destroyed sickness, but not everything was hot, and it only took someone handling cooled food with dirty hands to recontaminate it. 

Geralt knew this from the highly specific things he’d studied, but Jaskier-- well, they studied all of this sort of thing at Oxenfurt, surely. Jaskier absolutely knew it, and his tired eyes said so.

“I drank water,” Jaskier said grimly. “When we first got here. It seemed clean enough, and I was thirsty, so I drank it.” 

Geralt shook his head, and Jaskier closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he said, “Well, these people need your help.”

“You can’t stay here,” Geralt said. 

“If I’m already exposed, then I’ll only spread it wherever we try to go for safety,” Jaskier said. He turned the cup between his hands, looking grimly down into it. “Witchers are invulnerable to disease, aren’t they.” 

Geralt hesitated, but finally said “Yes,” and it felt like admitting something.

“In times of contagion, a Witcher’s services are needed more than ever,” Jaskier guessed, looking up under one raised eyebrow.

“Not necessarily,” Geralt said. “Not if it’s being handled well.”

“If the countryside is rotten with necrophages, it’s safe to say it’s not being handled well,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt pulled in a long, slow breath. “No,” he said. 

It was waterborne contagion, it took Geralt about five minutes of pointed questioning to determine. The innkeeper thought it was a curse, and was truly shocked by Jaskier’s succinct explanation of germ theory. “Not every problem where people die needs a Witcher,” Geralt growled.

“Unless you let it get out of hand,” Jaskier added sourly.

They didn’t stay at the inn. They rode out into the countryside. Geralt had encountered a great many epidemics and contagions in his time, and had learned that there was always a horrible incidental side-toll that wound up happening if the illness was severe enough to overwhelm people’s normal social coping mechanisms. Smaller settlements, outlying farmsteads, where if the primary caregiver succumbed to the illness, and there weren’t enough secondary ones, you wound up with awful by-catch, abandoned children, starving helpless folks who weren’t competent even when healthy to run the household on their own, and with the neighbors who’d normally look in on them dead or sick, would starve or injure themselves fatally trying to keep the household running. And sick people who would have recovered, but for starving to death while too weak to shift for themselves. 

So they spent the days riding a circuit, finding these outlying huts-- a dead old woman and a starving old man in one, a house full of suffering little children and their mother dying and the father too sick to cook for them. A woman in the throes of fever with a dead baby and her husband missing. An exhausted healer just succumbing to the infection himself, grimly trying to do the same work they were.

Geralt burned bodies during the days, and Jaskier fed the living. They collected abandoned livestock and consolidated supplies and people. It felt wrong to expose Jaskier like this, Geralt wanted to send him away, but he knew it was too late. There was no way he wouldn’t catch this. All the conscientious washing of hands, boiling of water before drinking, scrubbing of clothes, it wouldn’t save him, and he knew it, but he still worked with grim focus. And at dark, while Geralt was out hunting necrophages in the woods, Jaskier sat in the biggest room of the biggest house where they’d collected the sick, and played and sang for them until the children fell asleep and the widows stopped crying.

Jaskier came with him on the outing to check one particular outlying settlement. The healer had wanted to go there next, and was just too weak to travel, but he knew there was a family out there, at least four kids of varying ages, a husband-wife pair, the wife’s widowed sister, and the women’s mother and father, and the husband had been traveling out of town and nobody knew if he’d come back. 

But the widow usually came into town weekly and hadn’t, this past week, and the healer thought it likely the sickness was on them. So Geralt took some supplies, and Jaskier borrowed one of the abandoned horses and came along. 

“Smoke,” Geralt said, when they were some distance away.

“Like the house burned down, or like from the hearth?” Jaskier asked. He seemed healthy enough; Geralt was trying not to be a creep and sniff him all the time for signs of illness. So far, his temperature had stayed normal. But the disease often took six or seven days to come on, and they were at five days now.

“Hearth,” Geralt said, considering it. Then another smell hit him, and he sighed. “Death, I smell death.”

“Shit,” Jaskier said. 

“Someone’s alive, though,” Geralt said. “Or the house only just burned.” 

Jaskier tipped his head back, smelling in his ineffective humanish way with his mouth closed and his nose scrunched, and shook his head. “I don’t get any of that,” he said.

“You wouldn’t,” Geralt said. 

There were no tracks on the road. Nobody had been in or out in at least a week, possibly longer. They could see the bulk of the house now, on the cleared hillside, and smoke wisped from the chimney, but nobody was outside.

“Doesn’t look good,” Jaskier said doubtfully. 

Geralt cocked his head at a sound, and Jaskier, to his credit, noticed immediately and shut up. “Movement,” Geralt said. “Could be an animal.”

They stayed mounted. At the third settlement they’d found like this, there had been a ghoul in the house, in daylight, eating the dead. It paid to be cautious. 

There was no movement in the house as they approached. “ _Oh_ ,” Jaskier said suddenly, as they rode toward the door. “I smell it now.”

“Death,” Geralt said quietly. “Stay on the horse, I’ll go look.”

The door was closed. He unlatched it and pushed it open carefully, wincing a little at the powerful smell of death. They were dead in here, for sure. He heard movement again, though, now, and drew the silver sword before stepping through. Something was moving, but that didn’t mean anything was alive.

He heard Jaskier carefully moving the horses farther from the door, seeing him arm himself. Jaskier had grown a lot of common sense in this last handful of years. 

The cottage had two rooms, and in the main room there was a woman lying on the floor next to the table. The hearth was lit, though, the fire built up for cooking and showing signs of very recent tending. Who would leave a corpse lying but tend the fire?

He stepped farther in carefully, but lowered the sword a little. That wasn’t necrophage behavior either. He carefully bent down, but he didn’t have to touch the woman to know she was dead; she’d been gone a couple of days at least, past rigid back into limp and starting to bloat. He shook his head regretfully.

“Is anyone here?” he said. “I’ve come to help.”

Movement in the doorway to the other room, and he grimaced at the smell: there were a number of dead people in there. But someone was alive. He paused. Who wouldn’t answer? A weak survivor would call out. Unless they thought he was a bandit or something. He considered it, then sheathed his sword. “I’m not a bandit,” he said, “I’m a Witcher. The Viscount is paying me to take care of ghouls, but I’m checking for survivors too.”

No answer. He approached the doorway carefully. “It’s all right,” he said. He could hear frightened breathing. A human, small adult size, cowering in that room, and no other sounds of life at all. Maybe it was a child, but it sounded too big to be a preverbal one. Still, badly frightened enough, as any child would be in a house of the dead-- 

He stepped through the doorway, into a dim room with several beds, and a number of unmoving forms in the beds. Little kids, there had been little kids, and he gritted his teeth. One form huddled in the corner, huddled not slumped-- the survivor, then. He paused, considered, and then crouched down, because he knew he was an enormous looming figure in the doorway. 

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “They’re all dead. I’m so sorry. I can help you, you must be nearly out of food.”

It was a girl, unwashed, reeking of terror and confusion. Big enough, though, nearly full-grown, she should’ve been okay to take care of herself. But she stared at him with-- there was something about her face-- something in the shape of it, and he thought, maybe, he knew why she didn’t speak. 

She broke suddenly, scrambled to her feet and pushed out the far door of the room. He hadn’t realized there was a far door. But she flung it open and crashed through, running clumsily out in wild terror. Geralt waited a moment to follow, knowing that chasing her wasn’t the way to help.

Jaskier exclaimed as she ran past within his field of view, and Geralt came around the corner of the house then. “Oh, was that-- is that a-- why is she running?”

“I scared her,” Geralt said. She ran to the barn, and her movements were-- the fever hadn’t done that to her, she had been like that. “The poor thing,” he said, grimacing. She was simple, and clearly wasn’t capable of running the household on her own, or caring for the sick. They’d all gotten sick at the same time, and nobody had been strong enough to help this girl do the things she didn’t know how to do.

He followed slowly to the barn, and he could hear her crying; she’d huddled in a stall somewhere. The barn didn’t smell like death; the girl knew how to feed the animals, and so they were all just fine. She knew how to tend the fire, which was why it was also perfect. But she didn’t know how to wash herself, probably didn’t know how to make food for humans, and certainly didn’t know how to go for help. 

He stood at the door of the barn, and Jaskier dismounted and came and stood next to him. “Why are you waiting out here?” he asked.

Geralt shook his head. “She’s afraid of me,” he said. She must have been so scared, for days now, whether she understood what had happened or not.

Jaskier made a face. “Think I’d have any better luck?” he said. 

Geralt nodded. “You might,” he said. “But speak gently. I don’t think--”

“You think maybe the fever?” Jaskier said, grimacing and making a gesture by his temple. 

“No,” Geralt said. “I think she was already like that.” 

Jaskier made a face. “You mean,” he said.

“She’s simple,” Geralt said, and explained his deductions about the things she did and didn’t know how to do. “I don’t know if she understands what’s happened. I don’t know how to explain it to her. She’s probably starving, though. If you brought food that might help.”

Jaskier nodded, and went to the saddlebags. In a moment he came back with a small bag, and went slowly into the barn with it. “Hello?” he said, too loud. 

Geralt grimaced, and hissed at him. “Gently,” he hissed. “Speak gently.”

“Sorry,” Jaskier said. He hadn’t realized where the girl was, and was sort of-- wandering around the barn, and Geralt sighed inwardly. 

“Just sit in the middle aisle,” he said quietly. “Go about halfway down, sit down, and eat one of the apples, and talk quietly and tell her you’re here to help.”

Jaskier gave Geralt a quizzical look, but obeyed, going down to the main aisle and fastidiously clearing himself a spot to sit. He dug around in the bag, pulled out an apple, and bit into it. 

“We’re here looking for survivors,” he said, quietly enough. “We have food. We just want to help.”

Geralt moved away from the door so he wouldn’t cast a shadow, and let himself sit down. If they’d come a few days earlier-- but it didn’t help to think about, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t been saving other people in the meantime. At least they weren’t too late for this girl. He listened as Jaskier kept talking quietly, and thought about what he was going to do when Jaskier succumbed to this. They had to get more help than this. This wasn’t something he could keep up on his own when everyone else fell ill. 

He should’ve taken Jaskier to the next town and come back on his own, but. Probably the bard had already been exposed. It was just hard to face it. Jaskier was being braver than he’d expected, and hadn’t complained at all. 

“Oh,” Jaskier said. “There you are. Here, here, have-- okay you can have the one I was eating if you want. It’s okay. But I have another one. You could have your ow-- ok you can have both, that’s fine. Go ahead. Of course.”

No answer. Maybe the girl didn’t talk. Not unusual. Or maybe she was just starving and terrified and frantic, he couldn’t blame her.

Geralt waited a moment, listening to Jaskier keeping up a light stream of banter, and then stood up and slowly came to the door, leaning against the post so the swords wouldn’t be so visible. Jaskier waved to him. “That’s Geralt,” he said. “He’s my friend. My friend Geralt. He’s sorry he scared you. He doesn’t mean to look like that, he just does, he can’t help it.”

Geralt bit back a riposte to that, and instead waved a hand. The girl was crouched next to Jaskier, halfway through devouring a hunk of bread, and stared at him with wide eyes. 

“I am sorry,” he said, and took a couple of steps into the barn, but then crouched down again. She watched him warily, her chewing paused. Now he could see, she had the distinctive facial shape of a type of mutation that affected humans sometimes. Geralt had seen it before; sometimes superstitious sorts thought it was a curse, but it wasn’t. It was just a thing that happened. Sometimes it wasn’t even that bad; there could be heart deformities and things associated with it, but Geralt had met any number of adults living reasonably normal lives with the condition. 

“Poor thing,” Jaskier said. “She’s so hungry, you’re right.”

“You’ve done such a good job keeping the goats fed,” Geralt said softly. “And the fire built.”

“Mama,” the girl said finally. “Mama sleeping?”

Geralt closed his eyes, and looked down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She won’t wake up. We have to go.”

“Mama _sleeping_ ,” the girl insisted. 

“What’s your name?” Jaskier asked. “I’m Jaskier. I told you that’s Geralt. But you?”

The girl hesitated, suspicious. Jaskier gave her another piece of bread, and she ate it, thinking it over. It took them a little while to get the girl’s name, which was Pira. It took longer to get her out of the barn. Geralt went into the house, took a census of the dead, wrote it down as he’d been doing all along, and then found clean clothes for the girl. He knew they weren’t going to be able to get her bathed and changed-- they were two strange men, and she was traumatized enough. But once they got to help, someone would be able to, and she’d likely be more comfortable in her own clothes.

He also was going to have to burn the corpses of her family. Two adult women, two little children, an old man and an old woman. The husband was missing, and there should have been one more child, but potentially an older child that might have been traveling with him. And Pira was the fourth. 

Geralt wrote a note, in case the husband came back.

 _There was a contagion,_ he wrote clearly. _It is in the water. Do not drink or eat anything in this house._

_Pira is alive. She is all right._

_I found two women, two little children, an old man and an old woman dead in this house, from the contagion. They died peacefully-- it was a fever. Likely none of them knew what took them, by the end._

_Pira had kept the livestock fed and the fire tended but did not know how to feed herself. I found her in time, and she is healthy and safe. I have brought her back to town, and wherever I wind up leaving her, I will make sure that they know her name and where she came from. If you make inquiries you will be able to find her._

_I had to burn the bodies, I am very sorry, but there is too much danger from necrophages. I will arrange for disposition of the livestock Pira did such a good job caring for, and leave records of that with whoever takes charge of Pira._

_I am so sorry for your losses. The ashes are in the west meadow, undefiled-- I will put a stone marker there that you might find them._

_Sincerely,_

_Geralt of Rivia, Witcher of the Wolf School_

He thought it over, glanced around the house, confirmed that there were absolutely no books, pens, or paper in it, and then took out another sheet of paper, and drew a careful diagram.

Four adults, three of them in skirts. A medium-sized person in a skirt. Two small people. Then he drew X marks through all but the medium-sized person. And then he drew several goats, and drew a line around them and then extended part of it, like a handle, to the medium-sized person’s hand.

It seemed kindest, if the man couldn’t read, not to leave him in suspense until he could bring the note to someone who could. Geralt went back and added a drawing of the wolf from his medallion next to his signature; it might not mean anything, but it might. 

It took a great deal of persuasion to get Pira to go with Jaskier, but she was happy enough to help herd the goats. Clearly, those were her charges, and they were in excellent health and very used to her. Geralt stayed behind to take care of the necessary cleanup, and as he’d promised, dragged a big stone over and put it over the cooling ashes. He didn’t know if anyone would come back here, but he kept promises.

He had wrapped the dead in the bedding and burned it, and once that was gone, the house didn’t smell so bad. He left it as tidy as he could, with the fire scraped out and cleaned and everything closed up. Maybe no one would ever come back, but if they did, there would be nothing to horrify them further.

He caught up to Pira and Jaskier and the goats soon enough, and escorted them back to the house where they’d collected the others. The healer was upset, but happy enough to see Pira, and she knew him and threw herself into his arms. It was a good reunion, at least. Geralt went to wash the stench of death off himself, and Jaskier sat next to him as he scrubbed in the bucket.

“This is awful,” Jaskier said.

“It is,” Geralt said. He didn’t know what else to say, and Jaskier didn’t say anything else, so he finished his scrubbing in silence.

It took Jaskier a week to show symptoms, but on the seventh morning, Geralt rode back at dawn covered in the stench of death, and Jaskier came out the door to haul in water, smiled at him, and promptly went white and fell over.

“Fuck,” Geralt said.

Jaskier laughed weakly, sitting down on his butt in the dirt. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “I’m dizzy. Just give me a moment. Might not have slept enough.”

Geralt pulled off a glove, frowned at his hand, decided it was clean enough, and felt Jaskier’s forehead. It was cool, but not as cool as it should have been. “Heartbeat’s too slow,” he said; of course, to him, Jaskier’s heartbeat always raced, but it ought to have been faster than this. “You have it, all right.”

When had he memorized the usual tempo of Jaskier's heartbeat?

“Well,” Jaskier said, pulling his knees up and setting his elbows on them. “I guess it was about time.”

“It was,” Geralt said. He still had the back of his hand on Jaskier’s forehead. He turned his hand, holding Jaskier’s head with it gently, curling his fingers around the back of his skull, and used his thumb to push some of the hair away from the edge of Jaskier’s forehead where it was caught, a little, in sweat. He didn’t know what to say, and Jaskier just looked at him, blue-gray eyes sick and frightened but just mostly resigned in the pale dawn light. 

Geralt had the tiniest fraction of warning, as those eyes suddenly sparkled with mischief. “ _Now_ will you tell me why your horse is named Roach?” Jaskier asked.

Despite himself, Geralt laughed and looked away, letting go of him. “If you live,” he said. 

“Oh _come on_ ,” Jaskier protested.

“You have to survive. If you make it through, I’ll tell you the entire story.” 

“You are a _monster_ ,” Jaskier said.

“Yes,” Geralt said, and stood up, helping Jaskier to his feet and holding him as he swayed. That was one of the hallmark early symptoms of this contagion: a fever without the normal increase in heart rate. Too slow a heartbeat, in humans, made them dizzy on exertion. He watched Jaskier’s vision clear as his blood finally caught up with his changed posture, and sent him back inside, and hauled the water himself. 

The healer’s name was Lukas, and he was in the second phase of the disease, himself: he could move around in the mornings, but by afternoon his fever would rise so much he’d be delirious. Geralt came in after he’d cleaned himself off outside-- he washed himself well, with _Igni_ -heated water and real soap, because the last thing these people needed was for him to drag some hideous corpse-sickness in here on top of what they already had-- and found Lukas sitting on a stool tiredly making porridge for breakfast. 

Pira was singing to herself as she brought in the firewood, and Geralt smiled at her. She flapped her hands at him, possibly in greeting, after putting the firewood down; she wasn’t scared of him now, and was doing well enough, though she still didn’t understand where her family was.

Geralt crouched down next to Lukas, and said, “Jaskier’s got a fever and is dizzy.”

“Fuck,” Lukas said, and sighed. “He should’ve run when he had a chance.”

“It was too late,” Geralt said. “He knew it.” Lukas looked flushed and tired already; he was likely approaching the third phase of the disease, where he’d be too weak to get up. It could kill him, at this point, but the danger wouldn’t be gone until he’d survived another week or two, and even then he’d be so weakened anything else might kill him. Most of the victims had succumbed sometime after this point. “I’ll go into town today, try to get supplies. Help, if I can.” He had a certain local nobleman to speak to, as well.

The local nobleman was a viscount, overwhelmed and ill himself. Geralt angrily unloaded a stack of necrophage trophies for him, handed over his careful census of the dead, and clearly and concisely outlined all of the nobleman’s failings for him. The epidemic had begun with a sick traveller, who instead of helping, the villagers had shunned; the man had died in the woods, thereby polluting the local water source. Once the villagers had begun to die, they’d also thrown the corpses into the woods in suspicious fear of a curse, which had befouled the water in a wider area, spreading the contagion, and had begun to attract necrophages, endangering all the outlying houses. Now the contagion was well-established, and society was collapsing in places, and a single Witcher could never kill as many necrophages as this plague was going to produce if the viscount didn’t step the fuck up and _take charge_ of the _public health crisis_. 

“This is not a job for a Witcher,” Geralt snarled, “this is a job for _you_ , and your people are dying and it is _your fault_. Now get out there and _do something_ about it!”

There was some dithering, but there was another man there, a guard captain who’d been sent with a cavalry troop from the local count who was the next nobleman up the hierarchy, and he had some authority and grimly agreed with Geralt. He was the one who saw that Geralt was paid for the trophies, and helped him find supplies, and sent out a patrol to replace some of the daytime work he’d been doing, burning corpses and finding survivors. “Don’t let them drink the water without boiling it,” Geralt said, “even if it looks clean.”

“Oh, yes,” the captain said, “we’ve been boiling it.”

Geralt’s band of survivors was moved farther into town, set up in a makeshift hospital carved out of one of the viscount’s properties. Jaskier arrived under his own power, but wilted into a bed in short order. 

The first night, as Geralt went out hunting, Jaskier was propped comfortably in a corner, playing his lute for the much larger crowd of kids.

The second night, Jaskier was propped a great deal less comfortably in the corner, pink-cheeked and vague-eyed, and the lute was quiet as often as it wasn’t, but he tried.

Geralt hadn’t slept in several days, relying instead on brief spans of meditation here and there. He didn’t get back until midday, and went in to where Jaskier was. Finding him asleep in his pallet on the floor, Geralt propped himself against the wall next to him, and fell into meditation. 

He came out of it to find that Jaskier was sitting up next to him, looking pink-cheeked and vague-eyed, but alert enough. “Any luck?” Jaskier asked.

“Mm? Oh, the hunting’s been fine.” Geralt stretched, unkinking his neck. His eyes were gritty; he needed some real sleep. Not likely to happen soon. “How are you?”

“Rotten,” Jaskier said, “but, holding on. Mostly it’s just, you know how a fever is. All your joints hurt.” He considered that a moment. “Or, I guess, you don’t, if you can’t get sick.”

“I don’t get diseases,” Geralt said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not sick sometimes.” He rubbed a hand across his midsection, where he’d had a claw slash he’d been trying to get to heal up with the meditation. “I get a lot of fevers.”

“From what?” Jaskier asked, sounding almost offended. 

“Toxicity,” Geralt said. The inside of his mouth tasted absolutely horrible, like he’d been-- well, eating Drowner brains, he’d had to take a healing potion and that stuff was disgusting. He worked his mouth until he was able to swallow. “From the potions. It builds up and makes me sick.” Ugh, his teeth were foul, he’d forgotten to brush them before meditating. 

“I didn’t know that,” Jaskier said, sounding almost accusing. “I thought they were, well, magic.”

“All magic has a cost,” Geralt said. He tilted his chin toward Jaskier. “You eat anything today?”

“Ugh,” Jaskier said. “I tried. A little.” He made a face. “My guts hurt.”

This disease could effect the sufferer one of two ways. Geralt made a wry face. “Moving ‘em too much or too little?”

“Heh,” Jaskier said, “too little.” He made another face. “Don’t want to eat because it won’t ever... come out the other end, you know?”

“Yeah,” Geralt said. “But you have to eat to keep your strength up.”

Jaskier nodded. “It’s hard to remember to drink, too,” he said. “All I can think of is how the water’s tainted. But, I’m already sick, it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t,” Geralt agreed gently. “It’s dehydration and exhaustion that kills, not so much the disease itself.”

Jaskier sighed, making it over-dramatic and tipping his head back against the wall, and then laughed, looking over at Geralt. “You’re so cheerful,” he said. 

“I am,” Geralt said, “for a Witcher. The others think I’m far too friendly and cheerful and outgoing.”

“Oh, really?” Jaskier looked interested.

“Yes,” Geralt said. “I’m the bubbly one.”

He was homesick, suddenly. Not for the ruin that was, but the place that had been. The others, that had lived there. The kids, the instructors, the old herbalist who’d spent most of his time in the kitchens. The library master, who’d been an absolute bear about the books, and had taught Geralt to write. The other Witchers, who’d come back every winter and filled the keep and played games, sometimes for the amusement of the littles. 

Not the bones, in the moat, that were all that was left: he wasn’t homesick for that.

“That’s not true, is it,” Jaskier said softly.

“No,” Geralt said. “Not really.” It sort of was, though. He didn’t feel like trying to explain that.

“Will you tell me one true thing about your life?” Jaskier asked. “If you won’t tell me about your horse. One true thing.”

It was dim and quiet in here, and smelled of sickness and dying, and Geralt was tired and Jaskier smelled miserable. “Maybe,” he said. “Ask me a question and I’ll decide then.”

“One question,” Jaskier said. “Hm, I’d better make it count.”

Geralt shrugged. “If it counts too much,” he said, “I’d better warn you, I won’t answer it.”

“Why are you so guarded?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt considered that a moment. It had been reflexive, not the question Jaskier had meant to ask, but he thought about it anyway. “If I don’t guard myself, nobody else will,” he said. “You’ve seen my lifestyle firsthand, do you think I can afford to be open with anyone?”

Jaskier regarded him solemnly a moment. With some horror, Geralt noticed that Jaskier’s nose was bleeding, a steady trickle that had already run down beside his mouth and reached his chin. Jaskier noticed the direction of his gaze and wiped at his face, then blinked in puzzlement at the blood on his hand.

“Hold still,” Geralt said, and got out his handkerchief. He gently wiped the blood from Jaskier’s chin and lip, then pressed the cloth to his nose and let him take it. “It’s all right. Means you need to drink more water.”

For a moment, Jaskier’s frightened eyes watched him over the fold of the handkerchief, but he pulled himself together and nodded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's always strange later to go back and see author's notes that at the time were topical, sort of preserved like flies in amber, and this is one of those times where Christ, do I ever hope these quite soon seem sort of weird, like, "what was I so worried about", but anyway.
> 
> My family is fine, my job is tentatively fine, we're all okay so far right on the cusp of this terrifying pandemic thing, and so it seems weird that I'm nearly entirely paralyzed with terror over it so-- if you're not okay, if you're afraid, I'm here with you and I'm sorry this doesn't wrap up happy right now, I wish I'd been working on a fluff chapter instead because I am So Fucking Stressed right now.  
> __________
> 
> Incidentally: support your local small farmer, the farmer's markets are shut down in NYS and MA and so they're all trying to scramble and do home-delivery boxes instead. If you're wanting to stock up on food go to [localharvest.org](http://www.localharvest.org) (well, in the US anyway) and find a small farm near you and look on their Instagram or Facebook and see if they're doing anything like that. Before you buy 12 dozen slave-farmed Wal-mart eggs and 50 pounds of "self-regulated" commercial bacon, see if you can infuse some much-needed cash directly into your local economy. (If you're within 15 miles of Troy NY my sister's farm is [ Laughing Earth](http://www.laughingearth.farm).) (Hey if you're near DC look up Sylvanaqua Farms, they're rad.)
> 
> So there's my plug. It makes me feel better, maybe. I don't know. 
> 
> I don't know! Take care of yourselves, friends, and I'll try to post the other half of this story soon, and then Christ I am going to just write a bunch of _fluff_ what was I _thinking_.


	5. Spikes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we get an outsider perspective on some things, and Geralt blows a lot of stuff up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: child death, war scenery, massive injury, physical trauma, overuse of healing potions
> 
> the reader gets the answer to the Roach question but Jaskier doesn't, so this doesn't count as resolution really

Geralt’s next hunt involved coordinating with the Count’s men, under the Captain Benrick who’d been such a support in the meeting with the Viscount, to follow up reports of bandits taking advantage of the devastation. They rode out together, twenty men, a horse full of extra supplies, and Geralt. At their first destination, they found a small settlement’s remains, clear signs of violence, but also the signs that the corpses had been eaten afterward. 

“A disgusting business,” the captain said, and Geralt was slightly startled to realize the man was talking to him. He was sort of used to being disregarded, and most of the soldiers had been reluctant to so much as look at him, though one of them had kept staring at him oddly. 

He nodded. “You hate to see it,” he said. 

“But they were-- dead, before the, the creatures,” the captain said fumblingly.

“Oh,” Geralt said, “oh yes. The site was abandoned.” He gestured at a blood trail. “You can tell from the pattern of the tracks-- these were rotfiends and they generally don’t go after living prey to begin with, and the signs of struggle are all from before their arrival.” He sighed. “But, rotfiends tend to attract ghouls, who _eagerly_ go after living prey, and so I would remind your men to be extremely careful and not to separate from the group for any reason. The ghouls won’t go after you bunched up like this but any stragglers are going to get snapped up.”

“Ah,” the captain said, uneasy. “I, ah. I see.” And he wheeled his horse and rode back to the group of them, where his troopers had been wandering about the site with little heed for anything but their own dismay and horror at its contents. 

They rode on, and now it was growing late enough in the day that Geralt was starting to worry they wouldn’t find a good site to stay the night. Ideally, they wanted a building. He didn’t fancy the chances of this many men in the dark in a woods this full of corpse-eaters. 

“The local guide says there’s a farmstead up ahead,” the captain said to Geralt. “Respectfully, but-- do you intend to camp with us for the night, or will you be hunting?”

Geralt considered it. He hadn’t expected they’d want him nearby, but then, he’d been assuming they’d find decent shelter. “It might depend what we find,” he said. “If it’s dire enough, you’ll need me to keep you all alive overnight. But if it’s a decent campsite, I’ll probably leave you behind and go hunt.”

What they found was bad. The bandits had slaughtered everyone in the farmstead, horribly, and then had stayed on, and had been slaughtered themselves. Something had torn them apart, had left pieces of them-- and it had done so recently.

“Dead a little less than a day,” Geralt said, standing up from his investigation of the pieces of what had very clearly been a fleeing bandit, torn apart and partially devoured alive. “They died here last night.” He debated explaining the tracks, and decided not to: ghouls, and probably at least one alghoul, and definitely a frenzy of them.

The captain was still on his horse, staring down at him in poorly-disguised horror. “There’s not time for us to go anywhere else tonight,” he said, quietly. “We have to either stay here, and hope whatever it was doesn’t come back, or take our chances out in the woods.”

“Those are bad chances,” Geralt said. He looked up at the captain. “Fortunately, you have me. This will save me the trouble of hunting, it’s just as well.” Which was a lie, but, if the man had made an effort to be civil to him, he could try to be civil back. At least, until they all got killed. 

  
___  
  


Witchers were supposed to be unfeeling, impassive monsters, Captain Benrick knew, and he’d only ever seen one or two in his life, never really up close. They were intimidating, always in armor, with the weird prominence of two swords on their back like an advertisement of the strange in-between space they inhabited.

But his first impression of this one had been the man striding angrily into that previously stultifying meeting with the idiot viscount, and competently, coldly, _furiously_ eviscerating the man’s incompetence in extremely effective words. More effective words, in fact, than the ones Benrick had been using for the last hour of endless circular debates. And so he’d discovered that he respected the fellow, to his own surprise. 

Geralt of Rivia was, in fact, the witcher from that song, the White Wolf himself, and was a great deal less bloodthirsty and more drolly sarcastic than Benrick had expected. He spoke little, but had agreed readily enough to ride with them, and proved to be a decent travel companion. He’d seemed surprised, though, when Benrick spoke to him with a modicum of politeness, and had given him a wary once-over, like a half-tame dog, before answering him with remarkable civility. 

He did seem distraught, in a grim, quiet way, over the devastation they found. Benrick had expected he wouldn’t care, or maybe even would be glad of it, as it meant a larger payday for him, but his first impression held true: the Witcher was _angry_ , and sad, at the tragedy that had led to this, at the mismanagement that had made it worse. 

Once you were used to the inhuman wolf eyes, it was easier to read the man. He was tired and sad, and Benrick thought of the strange tale the healer had told him, that the Witcher had arrived with a human friend who was deathly ill now in the same plague that was bedeviling most of the town. Surely witchers didn’t have _friends_ , Benrick had said, and the healer had shaken her head and shrugged. 

Now, after a day spent watching the man’s grim face as he’d surveyed the sites, Benrick could believe it. Especially when the two of them had come upon the dismembered woman’s body, with the partial remains of the infant; there was just enough of them left to be clear that she’d died trying to shelter the baby.

Benrick had nearly been sick, and the Witcher had just stood there, arms crossed, on first glance impassive, but as Benrick had knelt facing away, trying to pull himself together, the Witcher had put a hand on his shoulder, very gently. He hadn’t said anything, but there wasn’t anything to say, and it had unmistakably been a sympathetic gesture. His hand had been very large and very warm, even though all the layers of clothing and armor.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Benrick had said finally, brokenly. 

“We can clean this up and keep it from spreading,” the Witcher had said, sad and tired but determined, and had gone to work pulling the scant remains into a pile to burn. 

Now they were trapped in another settlement, and it was falling to dusk. They’d worked as fast as they could to collect all the corpses, and the Witcher had used some magic from his hand to burn them quickly, fast and hot. The plan was that they’d collect the horses and themselves into the largest barn, which had a stone floor, and they would guard the doors and windows of it and try to stay alive until dawn.

The Witcher was going to stay outside the barn. Benrick thought this sounded like suicide, and said so, and the Witcher had given him a long, considering look.

“It might be,” he’d said, a bit wry, “but if I hide in there with you, then there’s nothing to keep them from pulling the walls down and eating you at leisure. So it’s for the best if I stay outside.”

He’d sketched out a basic guide for them of the different types of necrophages, but most of it had boiled down to the essential truth that no weapons any of them had would kill them, and most of them were so dangerous that successfully killing them would be as fatal for the defenders as failing to kill them. “Many of them give off poisonous gas when they die,” he’d explained. “Which poisons you, or, if there’s a spark, explodes and kills you. So if any of them get into the barn, you’re in a lot of trouble. Keep them out.”

As dusk fell, the Witcher stood in the barn’s main doors, which hadn’t been shut yet. There was a sturdy hayloft, and most of the men were up there; it had doors that opened, and they were open now so they could see what was coming. Periodically, Jats and Kurja would call out that all was clear from their opposite lookout posts, but it didn’t seem to reassure anyone. 

They’d cooked dinner, and then were to put the fire out. The Witcher had eaten with them, and contrary to Benrick’s expectations, he’d just eaten normal food, like a normal man. He was still gnawing thoughtfully on a hunk of hard bread as he stood in the door, so Benrick went and spoke to him.

“There’s really no assistance we can give you?” he said. All they had was a a huge stockpile of rocks, some slingshots, a few regular arrows, a small cache of fire arrows, and a highly specific set of circumstances the Witcher had given them to use them in. Namely, they should focus on the side of the barn he _wasn’t_ on. Which made sense; even if Witchers were inhumanly fast, they probably still didn’t like dodging rocks and fire arrows. 

“Not really,” the Witcher said. He regarded the bread for a moment, then looked at Benrick. “If I die, you’ll all die too, so I’ll try not to let that happen.”

“Aren’t you worried on your own account?” Benrick asked.

The Witcher contemplated that, raising an eyebrow, then said, “If I were that worried about it I’d’ve changed jobs a while back.”

Benrick just nodded, to that, but as he thought about it, it made ever less sense. “Well,” he said. “We’ll be at the windows and doors, let us know if there’s aught we can do.”

The Witcher nodded, drank a dipper of water from the barrel (he’d boiled it with magic from his hand earlier, to kill the contagion-- he’d been doing that for them all day, boiling containers of water so they could drink them without fear. A damn sight handier than having to build fires; they’d been boiling water and cooking their own food the whole time they’d been on this damned mission and it was getting old), and shoved the last of the bread into his mouth, then stepped out the door. Benrick waited a moment longer, and then the Witcher turned his head slightly and said, “Shut that door, it won’t be long now.”

They heaved the doors to, and barred them firmly. Benrick went to the little window in the small door at the corner of the barn, and watched as the Witcher very calmly lined up several little bottles and knocked each one back in turn with a methodical steadiness. 

Then he drew the silver sword from his back and ran his thumb meditatively along the edge. A moment’s stillness, and then he moved, faster than Benrick could see, out of range of his vision. There was a growl, the sharp shink of a sword, and several thuds, and then, slightly more distant, an explosion.

“There they are!” Kurja shouted in sudden terror, at the south end of the barn.

So it began. Darkness hadn’t even fully fallen, and all around them came the shuffles, groans, growls, and shrieks of the eaters of the dead, come to feast and angry at the burning of the corpses they’d expected. 

And among them, always a little faster than the eye could follow, danced the Witcher. All the vantage points in the loft were taken, but Benrick heard a lot of exclamations from the watchers. What he mostly could see were flashes of the silver sword, occasional bright flashes of red or golden light, and occasionally, the Witcher would be revealed, standing still and haloed in golden light as something exploded around him. 

The golden light seemed to shield him, magically. Benrick hadn’t quite believed that there was a kind of necrophage that exploded when you killed it, but these did seem to be doing so, some of them. Some of them went on two feet and looked like flayed corpses. Some went on four like beasts, slavering and gnashing. It was a field of nightmares out there, the worse for the intermittent light that only revealed them in glimpses, and sometimes the creatures would come close to the barn, and then the archers and slingshots would be busy. The lookouts had been assigned to keep track of where the Witcher was, to keep anyone from shooting at him. They had some trouble, but as it got darker, it was easier to spot the man, as his magic gave off light. 

The creatures were attracted toward him, they realized; Benrick had been expecting they’d have a terrible time fending off attacks on the barn wherever the Witcher wasn’t. But they clearly weren’t as enticed by the barn full of humans as they were the moving target, and more and more and more necrophages of different sorts kept coming.

How the man was keeping it up, Benrick couldn’t guess. They did their best to herd them, with their few fire arrows here and there and more often just a hail of rocks from the slingshots. But their efforts made little dint.

After a time, the creatures were scarcer, and there was quiet. A murmur went up from the watchers; no one could see the Witcher. 

“He’s abandoned us here,” someone said, as an unattended creature came sniffing up toward the barn. 

“If he were going to abandon us,” Kurja said disdainfully, “why would he have waited so long?”

The creature came toward the door, as if it knew what a door was, and made to approach, and then all the men with slingshots who’d been waiting for it to come within range let loose. It was driven back, and as it grew angry, one of the archers loosed one of their tiny stockpile of fire arrows.

It struck the creature, which flailed madly, and ran toward the barn, and then exploded. All the men in that overlooking window recoiled, just in time, and there were some wounded from the sounds of the cries. Benrick made his way up with Eirich, the medic, to keep the others calm. While Eirich bandaged the few burns, all thankfully minor, Benrick mostly stayed out of the way as the rest poured some of their hoarded water down on the flaming wreckage in front of the door, and got it put out. 

“One down,” Jats muttered, loud enough to be heard. “About a million to go.”

Just then, there was an explosion, a hundred yards off or so, and then a chain of explosions followed it, and out of the chaos the Witcher came running back into view. He was still fast, but running unevenly, as if limping. He ran straight for the barn, for the side that wasn’t recently on fire, and took a running leap up the side, catching handholds on the siding and scrambling up into the door of the haymow, which was open. “Let him in,” Benrick said urgently.

“Let him in, let him in,” Kurja was saying, and a few hands came out and pulled him up. Benrick ran over to talk to the man.

The Witcher was winded, breathing hard, and there were burnt streaks on his face and blood and other fluids all over him. “Water,” he said, and Kurja handed him a canteen, which he drained entirely, handed back, and held his hand out again. Someone else gave him one and he drank it too, then sat breathing hard for a moment. 

“How fares the battle?” Benrick asked. “By the gods, I feel useless in here.”

“All well here?” the Witcher asked, rather than answering.

“We killed a grand total of one, uh, something,” Benrick said, “down the other end. Blew up, injured a few of us, nobody dead. Horses holding steady downstairs, no panic yet.”

“Good,” the Witcher said. He was still breathing hard. His eyes were black, no whites visible, and in the dim light from the lamps they had burning to light their fire arrows from, Benrick could see that some of the blood vessels in his face and neck were visibly dark, as if with poison or infection. His leg was bleeding, Benrick could see the torn fabric and glistening blood where it was wet, but he couldn’t tell how severe the wound was.

“Do you need a bandage?” Benrick asked.

The man didn’t look at him. “I’m fine,” he said. He unfastened the pouch at his waist and pulled out a small glass bottle wrapped in leather, uncorked it, tipped a little of it over the torn bit of his trousers where he was leaking blood, grimaced and made a strangled little noise as it hissed and sizzled. Then he drank the rest. “More water?” he said. 

Someone handed him another canteen, and he drained it, then handed it back. “Thanks,” he said. He was still breathing hard, but he looked at Benrick now. “There was a wave of rotfiends, and mostly I’ve taken care of those, but more ghouls keep coming. I think there’s got to be another settlement nearby with a corpse pile, there’s just too many of them for what we found here. In the morning we should look for that, if.” He paused. “If we can,” he said, looking away. He gestured east. “I think it’s over there, whatever it is. That’s where they’re coming from. I just took out a large group of the rotfiends, sometimes you can kind of,” he waved vaguely, “daisy-chain the explosions, get them to kill one another, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more, they tunnel under the ground and they could be coming from quite a distance.” He paused to breathe, and wiped his face on his sleeve. 

“This all seems like a lot,” Benrick said.

“It is,” the Witcher answered. His hand was shaking as he put down the little empty bottle and pulled another from his waist pouch. He had half-finger gloves on and his knuckles were battered, bleeding through them. “Let’s just say I won’t be collecting any kind of trophies from this, I’ll consider myself well-paid just by surviving.” He uncorked the second little bottle and seemed to hesitate.

“What is that?” Benrick asked.

The Witcher turned those eerie black eyes on him. “Potions,” he said. “If I take too many they’ll kill me but if I take enough of ‘em maybe I’ll survive this fight.” He visibly steeled himself and knocked back the contents of the bottle, then set it down next to the first. His hands shook and he made a horrible face, closing his eyes, then opened them, scooped up both empty bottles, dumped them back into his belt pouch, and fastened it again. He made another face, pressed his hand to his chest, and burped. “Ugh.”

“What do they do?” Benrick asked.

“They’re intensely poisonous,” he said, “but they make me stronger and faster, mostly. Able to take more damage.” He burped again, making a pained face. “All right, I hear more coming.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Benrick said.

The Witcher shook his head a little. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “Listen-- one of the rotfiends I saw, but did not kill, was a scurver, which means they’ve got spikes. When they explode, the spikes go everywhere. If one of those gets near the barn, you’ve got to pull your people in and shut these upper doors-- those spikes come flying with incredible force, you’ll get some guys killed. Look out for spikes, all right? I’m trying to keep them away from here but I can’t-- guarantee that.” 

“All right,” Benrick said. He looked at Jats. “Did you catch that?”

“I did,” he said. 

“Good,” the Witcher said. “Well, good luck, gentlemen,” and with that he slid back out the window, hanging on with his fingertips while he caught the top of the door with his toes, then turned and jumped lightly down to the ground and ran back into the shadows.

There was a dark smear of his blood on the wooden floor where he’d been sitting.

“He’s creepy as fuck,” one of the guys said. 

“He’s the reason we’re still alive so far,” Benrick said. “You’d better hope he stays creepy as fuck, and not dead, yeah?”

“Oh,” the guy said, “yeah.”

Benrick made his way back downstairs, where he could keep an eye on the doors. 

It was quiet for a little while, and he realized the Witcher had intercepted the ones he’d heard coming some way off; he was fighting at a bit of a distance. All Benrick could see were reflected glimmers, of fire and the lights the Witcher’s spells gave off.

“What do we do if he dies?” Eirich murmured softly into Benrick’s ear. He was their medic, and had been friends with Benrick for years. 

“Probably,” Benrick said, “we die too.” 

There wasn’t much to say to that. Eirich climbed up onto the edge of an old cattle stanchion and peered out between a gap in the barn’s siding planks. There was a lull, mostly quiet, with only occasional flashes of Witcher magic like lightning off in the woods. The moon had come out, and it had grown a little chilly for a summer night. 

Something came snuffling around the outside of the barn, making the horses nervous. It clung to the shadows, and the lieutenants kept the men disciplined; no one threw anything at it, or made much noise, though surely it could smell them in here. They waited until it started digging at the corner of the barn, and then rained stones down into the shadow. It flailed and screeched a little, and made the mistake of backing into the light of the moon. Once they had a target, an archer shot it with a flaming arrow, and this time the creature obliged by running screeching off into the woods. 

“That’s as effective as we can be,” Eirich said glumly. 

“It’s a bit depressing, to know one’s worth is so limited in such a situation,” Benrick allowed.

“You don’t suppose that Witcher is dead yet?” Eirich asked. 

There was an explosion, and then another series of explosions. “Well,” Benrick said, “probably he wasn’t, but he might be now.”

Eirich laughed, but it was humorless, and they sat in silence for a few moments. There was no sound from the woods, no flickers of light. “Ah, fuck,” Eirich said, after a bit, “I was only joking, but maybe I jinxed him. Still, maybe we’re lucky and that was the last of them?”

There was a tense, waiting silence. Of the twenty men in the barn, and twenty-two horses, nobody was making noise, and nobody was at ease. Nobody was sleeping, tonight. 

“I think that’s him,” one of the lookouts said, and people rustled around upstairs, trying to look. “There, in the shadows?” He wasn’t speaking loudly, but the night was so quiet now his speaking voice carried softly down to them. 

Benrick peered into the shadows. There was movement there, intermittently. Something man-sized, perhaps. A gleam of metal. A man, walking slowly for a few steps, then staggering down to his knees, then getting up again. 

He stumbled out into the moonlight and went down again, legs underneath him, holding the silver sword in one hand, the other hand propped on his knee, head bowed and body moving slightly as he breathed hard. The moonlight caught silver in his hair, what of it wasn’t streaked with filth or stuck to his face with sweat.

He was clearly badly injured and exhausted. After a moment he pushed himself back up and took another couple of faltering steps toward the barn, then went down again. He was perhaps favoring one leg, but it looked more like he was just at the end of his endurance. Maybe injured, somewhere in the middle. Hard to say. 

“We have to go help him,” Benrick said. 

“Are you _crazy_?” Eirich said. 

“I’ll help,” Karls said, from beside Benrick’s elbow. He was one of the younger ones, from around here-- a quiet kid, obedient. He’d been upstairs, and had clearly come down to this door to do just this.

“So guard the door,” Benrick said to Eirich, and unlatched it.

The Witcher had gotten to his feet again and staggered a few strides closer. As they opened the door, he paused, one hand on his knee and the other trailing the sword on the ground, bent over and breathing hard, and looked up at them. “What are you doing,” he said hoarsely. 

“You’ve got to get inside, you can’t fight like this,” Benrick said. He and Karls ran out and each of them took one of the Witcher’s arms over their shoulders. Benrick gently freed the silver sword from the Witcher’s gore-encrusted hand, and between the two of them they managed to run back with the Witcher almost dead-weight between them. 

Eirich slammed the door shut behind them, and the Witcher’s knees let go so they let him down to sit on the floor. “Water,” Benrick said, “bring water,” and someone brought over a whole bucket with the dipper in it.

The Witcher drank three or four dippers full of water, and then wiped his face and said “Saddlebag, with the green tooling?”

Karls went for it, and Eirich said, “Can I bandage that?”

“No,” the Witcher said, “it’ll get in the way. Can’t take the armor off, there’s more coming.”

“You can’t go back out there,” Eirich said. He was sitting on his heels beside the Witcher with one of the lanterns, and in its light Benrick could see that the Witcher’s chest was scored with deep claw-marks, through the armor, down through the skin in places, and his arms and shoulders were scored up as well, and his hands were shaking. 

“I’m not going to wait in here to die,” the Witcher said. “There’s another-- rotfiends and a scurver, stopped to eat their own dead but-- be over here in a little while. Barn won’t hold them off at all, you’d be better off aiming stones at-- yourselves for the good they’ll do.”

They absorbed that with grim silence. “Well,” Benrick said, sitting on his heels on the Witcher’s other side. 

Karls came back with the saddlebag, and the Witcher’s hands were shaking too badly to work the clasps, so he opened it for him as well. There was an array of gleaming leather-wrapped bottles, all arranged neatly by some obscure classification, and the Witcher counted them and then sat reckoning numbers on his fingers. 

“This,” he said, hovering his fingers over a bottle. “Or… this.” He turned his hand and counted again. “How many hours has it been?”

Benrick was the one with the watch, so he consulted it. “Since all this started, at dark? Six,” he said. 

“Mm.” That didn’t seem like the answer he’d wanted. “If I had an hour... I don’t have an hour.” He fumbled at his belt pouch until he got it open, and pulled out the various empty little bottles he’d had in there, lined them up, and considered them. 

After a moment he glanced up at the circle of faces around him, and said, “I don’t usually have an audience for this.”

“There’s little else any of us can do,” Eirich said. “And naught to think about save how likely we all are to die, so. You’re the most interesting thing in this barn. But as the medic, I’d like to say, I’d have a powerful interest in what’s in those potions anyway, even if my continued survival weren’t depending on it.”

“Poison,” the Witcher said. “Powerful poison. Even the base alcohols in most of these would kill you. Don’t get any ideas.”

“I don’t have any ideas,” Eirich assured him. 

“Two hours til dawn, probably,” the Witcher said. “I’ve… one, two, three…” He filed the empty glass bottles back into the saddlebag, and drank another dipper of water. 

“Should you eat something?” Eirich asked. 

The Witcher shook his head. “Won’t help,” he said. “Liver’s the limitation, not dilution. Choice is,” and he picked up one bottle, “heal, start over, or,” and he set it down and picked up a different bottle, “crank myself up so I can take more damage.” He put the second bottle down, and said, “Both’ll kill me outright. Have to pick one.”

“A grim calculation,” Benrick said quietly. 

The Witcher closed his eyes and sat a moment, breathing slowing gradually back toward normal. He was bleeding enough that it was dripping on the floor, now. He had normal, human-looking blood, red and coppery-smelling. 

In a moment he opened his eyes and looked at Benrick. In the dimness his eyes weren’t so jarring, and he just looked tired. After a moment he looked away, back down to the saddlebag of bottles.

He put one of the bottles into his belt pouch, selected another one and put it in as well, and then sat holding a third in his unsteady hand. “Which is it?” Benrick asked.

“More damage,” he said, quiet and hoarse. “I’ll worry about tomorrow if it proves to be relevant.” Benrick nodded. “Listen,” the Witcher said after a moment. “They’re coming. Remember what I told you about the scurver?”

“Covered in spikes,” Benrick said. “Boom.”

“Get everyone away from the open windows. Might come through the walls. I’m going to try to keep it away from the building but.” He gave Benrick a ghastly grin. “Not moving as fast as I was. Might not be able to get him far. Spikes will shred anyone too close when it goes.”

“Understood,” Benrick said. 

The Witcher drank another dipper of water, downed the potion in his hand, dropped the empty bottle back in to his saddlebag, and shuddered in distaste, then drank another dipper of water. “All right,” he said quietly, as if to himself, hands braced on his thighs, head bowed, and leaned forward for a moment before pushing himself back. “All right,” he said again, and climbed laboriously to his feet. 

“Can the archers assist you?” Benrick asked.

The Witcher had his eyes closed, clearly collecting his balance. In a moment, he nodded. “If they can get a target that’s clearly not me,” he said. “I guess at this point they may as well.” He stood up, and Benrick handed him back his silver sword, which he’d been holding. “Thanks,” the Witcher said. 

“Good luck,” Benrick said, which seemed inadequate. The man was clearly not in any state to be fighting for all of their lives. Another shudder wracked him, and he squinted against it.

“No more time to waste,” the Witcher said, and turned and walked out the door as if he hadn’t had to be dragged in. He closed it behind himself, moving smoothly enough, and Benrick went to the little window to watch him walk away across the moonlit grass. 

“Less than two hours to dawn, now,” Eirich said.

Benrick sent a man upstairs to pass the word about the scurver and its spikes. They settled into watchful silence again. 

Time passed. They heard nothing. There should have been birds singing; it wasn’t getting light yet but false dawn would come soon. But no birds sang, and the night was silent. 

A light flared, in the forest. “There,” one of the lookouts said, “yes, that was him.”

“At the rate he was losing blood,” Eirich said quietly to Benrick, having resumed his post at the cattle stanchion, “I’d give him about three hours on his feet. Apart from any other considerations.”

There was a puddle of blood on the floor, where he’d been kneeling. 

“But he’s not human,” Eirich said, “not exactly, so I couldn’t really guess what our chances are.”

Dawn wasn’t even a guarantee of the end of it, it just meant some of the monsters would go to sleep. They might be trapped here. It didn’t bear much thinking about, because there was nothing to be done. If the Witcher had killed enough of the monsters, then the population would be thinned out and they’d be able to maybe locate and destroy the corpse pile tomorrow in the daylight. If he hadn’t, then they’d get shredded tomorrow and not be able to make it back to safety. Either way it wasn’t getting them out of this barn tonight.

Several more light flares, and an explosion, and that golden flare of light that meant the Witcher had protected himself. Benrick’s eyes were so over-strained now that in the spaces between the light flares, he kept imagining movement in the moonlight and shadows, things crawling, things twisting, but the lookouts would call that out, wouldn’t they?

Eirich was looking at the same places he was, and hadn’t said anything, so it must be his eyes. Benrick closed his eyes, and despite himself, dozed off where he stood, or at least stopped noticing the passage of time for an indeterminate period. 

“Ah,” Eirich said, and Benrick blinked back to awareness. The Witcher was visible in the moonlight, walking across the expanse of grass, slowly and warily. But he was moving, and on his feet, sword in his hand. 

He stopped, in the middle of the open expanse of moonlit field, and stood, facing away, head tilted-- listening, perhaps. His movements were fluid enough but the angle of his shoulders showed his exhaustion, and while his legs didn’t shake, he swayed a little as he stood. 

“Are there more out there, sir?” one of the lookouts called, soft and hoarse. 

The Witcher nodded, glancing back toward him, but didn’t speak, returning to his grim surveillance of the edge of the woods. 

“The bugger with the spikes?” the lookout persisted.

The Witcher nodded again. “Still out there,” he said. He held his hand up, as if for quiet, and tilted his head, beginning to walk toward the edge of the forest. 

Suddenly a creature burst out of it, one of the ones on two legs, and came running toward him. It moved fast, but one of the archers was faster, and slammed a fire arrow into it with fantastic accuracy. It staggered, and the Witcher leapt forward, cut it expertly almost in half with the sword, and then leapt back and flung a spell from his hand at it that threw it backward. It convulsed, and then burst, and the Witcher crouched, covering himself with one of those golden spells. Hunks of the thing rained down, bouncing off the shield spell, and a cloud of stench rolled across the field, but it was far enough away that it dissipated before it reached the barn.

There was no respite; another creature came out of the woods, shuffling with slightly more caution-- no, there were two of them. Three. The Witcher climbed back up to his feet, and the same archer shot one of the creatures with another flaming arrow. It hit the hindmost of the creatures, who roared and staggered; the Witcher leapt at the foremost, sliced it, shoved it into the arrow-wounded one, sliced it again, and then leapt backward. He was trying to herd them, to keep them close together, but the third one darted out toward him and attacked, snapping with its teeth. 

The third one had the spikes, Benrick realized-- it looked like the others, like a hideous flayed corpse, but it had protuberances that looked like rocks or awful jagged chunks of dry bone, sticking out of it all over like a gruesome hedgehog of foulest death. It swiped at the Witcher, who dodged, lost his footing, and rolled. 

The other two monsters, the wounded ones, had separated themselves and now were moving around to encircle the Witcher. They were herding him, now, toward the barn, perhaps unwittingly, but the Witcher was clearly aware of it and kept trying to dodge, to feint and change their direction. 

Benrick could see, as he threw another one of his hand-spells, that they took tremendous effort; the Witcher grimaced as if the thing were a heavy weight he was lifting, and the effort of it pushed him backward even as he threw it into one of the monsters and knocked it over. He darted in and stabbed it, and threw himself backward again, trying to get out of range as it exploded.

He half-succeeded, but the force of it threw him farther and his shield-spell was weak and fizzled out as he hit the ground, very hard, and lay there for too long, moving feebly. 

Two of the monsters were still up and moving, one of them the one with spikes, and both of them darted forward at the downed Witcher. The archer got off another flaming arrow and it hit the spiked one, which broke off its attack and turned toward the barn, snarling. The other monster ran into it and did itself some injury on the spikes. 

But the spiked creature was now stalking toward the barn. The Witcher rolled over, retrieved his sword, and got shakily to his feet. “Close the haymow door!” he shouted breathlessly. “Close it!” And he leapt on the injured creature, which was reeling after the impact with the spiked one, stabbed it, and ran. 

The explosion of the one he’d just killed distracted the spiked one, which turned back toward the Witcher and attacked the golden shield spell he’d hastily wrapped himself in. The spell disintegrated, and the Witcher cut the creature’s arm off as it came through.

It hit him with its other arm, sending him flying. The archer, who had apparently not closed the haymow door after all, hit it with another flaming arrow, and it turned back toward the barn with a roar of fury.

“No,” the Witcher said, desperate, and staggered to his feet, retrieving his sword again. “You fucker! Come back here! I’ll beat you to death with your own fucking arm!” 

Bendrick wouldn’t have thought the creatures would understand words, but it paused, then turned back. The Witcher stood wavering, one leg clearly no longer capable of supporting him, the sword clutched in both hands. 

“I’m out of arrows,” the archer said. 

“Good,” the Witcher answered. “It’s too close. Shut the fucking door. Get away--”

The creature charged him, and the Witcher leapt in to meet it with a huge swing that cut through most of its midsection, bounced off it, and sprawled across the ground. The spiked thing made a horrible coughing sound, reeled in place, and the Witcher tried to get up, fell, and rolled onto his back, casting one of those shield spells.

The creature exploded and Benrick jumped back away from the door as spikes shot everywhere, thudding into the barn walls, slamming through the wood in places. Men screamed, but as the chaos settled, Benrick was astonished to find that he wasn’t injured. 

“Is anyone injured?” Eirich asked. “Anyone?”

People felt themselves over, and it became apparent that despite there being spikes all through the wall and into the ceiling, nobody had been impaled. One man had a scratch but he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t from the splinters on a beam he’d grabbed. 

Benrick went to the window and looked out with some dread, wondering where the Witcher was. 

The wreckage of the beast was scattered across the field. In the midst of it lay what had to be the Witcher, still vaguely human-shaped, sprawled on his back, shield spell gone. 

“Is he dead?” Eirich said, at Benrick’s elbow. 

As Benrick was about to answer in the affirmative, the Witcher bent one knee, raising it a little, then kicked his leg out straight and lay still. “No,” Benrick said. “Karls!”

“Here,” Karls said.

“If we go, fast--”

“Yes,” Karls said, and they threw the door open and ran out together, half-expecting to be attacked at any second by more of those creatures.

The Witcher was lying flat on his back with his eyes and mouth open, staring up, and as they bent over him he blinked at them and bared his teeth in what looked like pure reflex. He was all blood, and there was a spike through his torso, hard to make out where through the blood, and another in his leg, and another had carved a huge gouge out of his arm, but he was alive. Karls grabbed his shoulders and picked him up with a mighty heave, and Benrick grabbed his legs, and together they hauled him back the short eternity of distance to the barn.

He was unconscious when they laid him down, maybe dead, head lolling, mouth drooling blood. “Fuck,” Eirich said, “I don’t even know where to start.”

The barn door closed and latched behind them, they got the Witcher tidily arranged in an open space, the floor of the old milking parlor. He regained consciousness enough to snarl at them, but clearly had no idea where he was or who they were-- like an injured wolf, a dying animal.

“Get him upright,” Eirich said. “That’s got to be affecting the lung, he’ll drown if we don’t--” 

They propped him up with a plank of wood, a pile of hay, a milking stool, and a cattle stanchion, and Karls and Benrick set to work getting the shreds of his armor off him. Eirich wiped away enough of the blood to begin to see his injuries. 

The spike was lodged in his ribcage on one side, and blood welled around it ominously. “If he were one of our guys I’d mercy him,” Eirich said. “This isn’t-- you don’t survive this. But he’s not.”

“Don’t-- touch me--” the Witcher snarled disjointedly, but he was too weak to struggle, and Benrick and Karls held his arms down with no trouble. 

“Listen to me,” Eirich said. “Hey.” He turned to Benrick. “What’s his name?”

“Geralt,” Benrick said. 

“Geralt,” Eirich said. “Listen. It’s all right. I’m Eirich, a medic. I need you to tell me how to treat you.”

“Can Witchers die?” Karls asked quietly. 

“Yes,” Benrick said. 

“Yes,” the Witcher said. He looked at Eirich, focusing with some difficulty. Benrick’s impression of a dying animal came back; there was an awful kind of knowledge there. His eyes were still all black, edge to edge, and his skin corpse-white, the veins dark.

“I can go two ways,” Eirich said. “I can remove this thing, and try to stop the bleeding, and put a patch of leather over it to keep the lung from collapsing all the way, and maybe you can heal from that. I have had patients recover, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, especially for you.” 

The Witcher just considered him, waiting, breaths shallow and pained and blood in his mouth. His heart was beating slowly but so hard it visibly shook his body with every beat. 

“Or I can leave it, and give you tincture of poppy,” Eirich said, quieter, “until you don’t feel it and your heart stops, and we’ll keep you warm and still until that happens.” 

The Witcher blinked, at that, and managed to look surprised. “Ha,” he got out, through his bloody teeth, “that’s a kind offer-- but you don’t have-- enough tincture of poppy-- for that.”

“You’re likely to have something better for it in that saddlebag of yours,” Eirich said, and in a moment, the saddlebag was set down by Benrick’s side, proving how much of an audience they had, though the others were staying back in respect. Good. 

“True,” the Witcher said. “I do.”

“If that’s what you want, the offer stands,” Eirich said. “We’ll keep you warm and still until your heart stops, and burn you after.”

The Witcher considered it. “It’s in the lung,” he said.

“It is,” Eirich confirmed. “Bleeding’s bad but will be worse if we remove it. The one in your leg likewise, with the bleeding, but I think I can stanch that. Do you want me to start there? Or do you want to be made comfortable?”

“I didn’t--expect choices,” the Witcher said after a moment. “Usually-- humans leave us-- to die, at best.”

“You saved us,” Benrick said. “And you didn’t have to. You could have run off and nobody would have known.”

“You saved my cousin’s life,” Karls said, unexpectedly. “Pira. You didn’t-- she would have died, alone, and wouldn’t have understood.”

“Mm,” the Witcher said, clearly recognizing the name. 

“No one else dared go look,” Karls concluded, a little shyly. He cast his eyes down. “ _I_ didn’t.”

“A sweet girl,” the Witcher said. He breathed, laboriously; it was clearly getting harder for him to do so, and he had his head tipped back like a drowning man. “All right,” he said, with a grimace, “I want this thing out.”

“It might kill you,” Eirich said. “Do you have a family? Is there anyone we should send word?”

The Witcher closed his eyes for a moment. “Just-- give my medallion-- to the next-- Witcher you see,” he said. “They’ll know.”

Eirich nodded, and went to his bag, laying out supplies. “Anyone else we should send word to?”

“Your friend,” Benrick said. “Or-- weren’t you traveling with someone?”

The Witcher blinked, glanced at him, and closed his eyes again. “Yeah,” he said. “The kid. Jaskier. Bard.”

“I heard he was ill,” Benrick said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” the Witcher said again. “But if he lives-- I promised him-- answer to a riddle.”

“I’ll tell him,” Benrick said. 

The Witcher opened his eyes. “Only if he lives,” he said. 

“Nobody lives forever,” Benrick pointed out.

The Witcher laughed a little, and coughed, and blood came out of his mouth, shocking red on the white of his skin. “Fair,” he said. “Nngh. Tell him-- she eats them.”

“She eats them,” Benrick echoed, a little puzzled. It wasn’t a riddle he’d heard before.

“He’ll understand,” the Witcher said. “She. Eats. Them.” 

“I’ll tell him,” Benrick said. 

“Only if he-- lives,” the Witcher said again. He squeezed his eyes shut, clearly in pain. “All right. Get that thing out.”

Benrick put his hands where Eirich directed him to, and-- well, he’d been a soldier a long time, he wasn’t squeamish and he’d seen a lot of things, but a very unpleasant interlude followed, and at the end of it Eirich slapped a square patch of leather over the jagged wound, and then bound it tightly with a pad of cloth and straps of linen, and the Witcher went limp and unmoving, unbreathing, for a long moment but at the end of it his eyelids fluttered up again and he gasped and twitched.

Improbably, he said, “That didn’t tickle,” and stared at the ceiling taking short shallow breaths for a moment.

“We’ll know in a moment if there’s too much bleeding,” Eirich said grimly. 

“Mm,” the Witcher said. “Now do the other one.”

“You want me to?” Eirich asked, skeptical.

“Yes,” the Witcher said, and Eirich laid his supplies out again and with more strategic assistance, during which Karls stumbled away to take a long moment with his head between his knees, they wrenched the spike out of the Witcher’s leg.

The man passed out again and sat propped there with his head tipped back looking dead, but Eirich finished bandaging his leg and tipped it up and told Benrick to hold pressure on it anyway.

“Is he dead?” Benrick asked quietly.

“Bleeding too hard to be dead,” Eirich pointed out. “Hold that hard, now.” He leaned in and gently patted the Witcher’s cheek. “Come on, Geralt. Come on. I need you to tell me what medicine I can use.”

After a long moment, the Witcher’s eyes opened, and after another moment of blankness, they sharpened. “It’s out?”

“It’s out,” Eirich said. He dragged the saddlebag over and flipped it open. “Surely one of these will help. Tell me which one.”

The Witcher closed his eyes a moment, but he was only concentrating. “Too toxic,” he said. “I need-- two. One in-- belt pouch.”

Eirich opened the Witcher’s belt pouch and pulled out, carefully, a broken bottle and some shards, then an intact one still wrapped in leather, and a second intact one. 

“Empty one broke,” the Witcher said dismissively. He looked at the two Eirich was holding. “Left one.”

Eirich put the other down, and worked the cork out of the selected one. He tipped it into the Witcher’s mouth, who grimaced as he swallowed. 

“Water,” Benrick said, and Karls got up and went over to the barrel. He came back with the bucket and dipper. 

The Witcher only drank a little bit of water. He had gone even paler, and he shuddered, breathing growing even more labored. “What did that one do?” Eirich asked quietly. 

The Witcher shuddered again, and coughed painfully, hard enough to drool blood. “Flushes toxins,” he said, in a moment. “Cancels out-- all the others.” He coughed again, and spent an uncomfortable interlude just breathing. “Might kill me,” he added. 

“Now he tells me,” Eirich said. 

“In another-- minute,” the Witcher said. “There’s another one. One I had out-- earlier.”

Eirich held up a bottle. The Witcher shook his head. “Red,” he said. “White string on neck.” Eirich fished around, held up several others. “That one,” the Witcher said. “Label on it?”

Eirich turned the bottle. “Rass,” he said. “Raff?”

“Raff,” the Witcher said. “That one.” He was really struggling to breathe, now; he’d gone past white and looked gray. He closed his eyes for a long moment, and his heartbeat was even more visibly shaking his body. But, Benrick noticed, the dark color to his veins was also fading out.

And when he opened his eyes, they were back to golden, with his pupils large but not entirely taking over his eye anymore, the black receding from the corners of his eyes. “Now,” he said weakly. “Careful. Don’t spill. Or let it-- touch you.”

“He looks about dead,” someone muttered to Karls, as Eirich carefully tipped the bottle into the Witcher’s mouth.

Benrick glanced over to shoot an unimpressed look at the speaker, and glanced back as the Witcher made a choking noise. He was still holding pressure on the man’s leg, but lost his grip as the Witcher thrashed violently, then sat up straight, eyes rolling back. 

He coughed, doubled over and coughed again, and Benrick and Eirich caught him and pulled him back upright. His mouth was shocking red with bloody froth against his white face, but he opened his eyes and looked at them with vague, unfocused alarm, and then subsided back against the plank where he’d been leaning before.

“Not dead yet,” Eirich said. 

After a moment of labored breathing, the Witcher said, “Not dead yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IDK yet if I'm going to go into some kind of lockdown or quarantine or what, I'll probably either have a shitload of time to write or none at all! so we'll see. but i'm close on the fluff final chapter. i swear i'm close.  
> I hope you all are safe and doing well.


	6. Swallow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some comfort, finally. Just a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha, and i thought this was going to be the wrap-up. No, there's more. I had to split it in half, it was getting long. More for y'all! As soon as I can get to it!

  
  


Geralt came to himself slowly, attended first by a gnawing, burning feeling in his lungs, in his body, in all his joints, and then attended by a powerful overwhelming sense of thirst. He managed to peel his eyes open and found he was indoors, in a dim room, propped half-upright on a straw pallet, wearing an unfamiliar shirt and a lot of bandages and his mouth tasted toxic, toxic, toxic. 

It took him several tries to get his eyes to not only stay open, but to get them pointing the same direction, and then he had to try to reconnect to the rest of his body. It was alarming; he’d clearly been quite badly injured. He hadn’t felt like this since-- 

Since the Trials, and for a moment he was disoriented enough to think himself back in Kaer Morhen. In sudden panic he managed to move an arm, uncoordinated and heavy, smacking himself in the chest as he struggled to bend the elbow. He managed to touch his own face, finding it-- roughly the same as it ever had been-- finding the breadth of his own chest to be familiar-- 

He’d been afraid he’d been transformed again, that he’d find himself something unfamiliar. But context came back, a little, as he moved his stiffly unresponsive body. He was alive. He’d been in a fight and gotten hurt. He managed to swallow, painfully, and looked around the room. He badly needed a drink of water, and to find out what was going on.

“Geralt?” 

He blinked again, and turned his head toward the sound. After a moment, he managed to focus bleary eyes. “Jaskier,” he said. Oh yes. The contagion. The necrophages. The scurver.

He felt the bandages on his chest, again. Oh yes. Lung injury. That had been pretty intense. He had not enjoyed that. He took an experimental breath, felt that there was still damage, grimaced, and let it out. Fucking, White Raffard’s decoction. It had definitely saved his life but it was an unpleasantly wild journey. 

“Are you alive?” Jaskier asked.

“Mm,” Geralt said. “Dunno yet. You?”

“I don’t know yet either,” Jaskier said. 

“Mmng,” Geralt said, or rather sort of groaned. He tried to sit up, but got no farther than leaning his head slightly forward before his body informed him in no uncertain terms that he would not be doing that. 

“You look terrible,” Jaskier said. “When they brought you in here I thought you were dead.”

“Feels terrible,” Geralt said. “Water, need water.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said, and rustled around. In a moment, he scooted over, with a cup in his hand. “Forgive me, I’m not very steady just now.”

Geralt tried to take the cup from him but his arm wasn’t entirely under his control, so Jaskier had to hold it for him. He did so with both hands, tipping it with exquisite care. Geralt wanted to drink it all, but it was hard to coordinate himself, and could only manage a few swallows. Still, it helped. 

Jaskier set the cup down and slouched as he sat. “So,” he said, “you’re an asshole.”

“Mm,” Geralt agreed. “Why, now, though?”

“They dropped you off when I was mostly delirious,” Jaskier said, “so I’m not sure, but there was all this to-do where you’d apparently told the cavalry captain some answer to some riddle for me, but he wasn’t allowed to tell me until I survived this plague? So there’s been all kinds of shenanigans with him writing it down and giving it to the healer, and she’s all smug about this, and it’s a whole thing. What possible riddle could you be answering, and why of all things is that what you told them before collapsing, nigh unto death?”

“Oh,” Geralt said. It was all rather hazy, but he did remember the conversation that must have preceded that. “Oh, yes, I was. I was dying. And they wanted to know. If there was anything. I needed to tell. Anybody.” Breathing was still really hard. “Mm, talking is hard.”

“No,” Jaskier said, “you’re not weaseling out of this!”

“Have you ever,” Geralt said slowly, a bit vaguely, “tasted the inside, of your own lung?” He tipped his head back to get a better angle for his airway so he could breathe with a little less resistance. “‘Sgross.”

“Do you need more water?” Jaskier asked, distracted from his indignation.

“Yes,” Geralt said. He wasn’t sure what he needed. He’d never been this badly injured, he realized with some surprise. Well, not that he could remember. Jaskier helped him drink more, and it helped a little, but he needed another healing potion, probably. “Jaskier, what color-- my eyes?” He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d taken the Raffard’s. That stuff was horrifyingly toxic. 

“Uh,” Jaskier said. “This is-- I mean, poetically? Metaphorically?”

“Currently,” Geralt said. “Literally.” He thought about explaining, thought about how many words that would be, thought about moving his mouth, and then thought about the breath required to make the sounds, and gave up. 

“I, probably gold, is how I’d describe them,” Jaskier said. That was a lot of words. 

“Good,” Geralt said. “Not black.”

“Oh, no,” Jaskier said, “not black, though your pupils are pretty big. I mean, it’s dim in here.” 

_Not to me_ , Geralt would have said, but words, too hard. He breathed for a moment, and then gathered himself to turn his head. “Potions bag,” he said. 

Jaskier pushed himself to his feet, wobbly, and Geralt was instantly remorseful-- Jaskier was seriously ill and he shouldn’t be pushing him around, but Geralt’s body had been entirely replaced with limp dirty socks full of lead pellets, and he couldn’t fucking breathe. 

He didn’t know what would happen if he was too badly damaged for a potion to heal. 

Some of the instructors at Kaer Morhen had been old Witchers who’d gotten damaged to the point of not being able to heal entirely. Blinded, deafened, missing fingers. The one who’d taught him to read had been missing a leg below the knee, no potion could heal that.

But there were no young Witchers anymore. No one to teach. There was nothing but the Path now.

Jaskier came back, and the healer with him. Geralt didn’t remember her name. Laila, maybe. She knelt beside him, looking him over with an expression that looked like wonder.

“I didn’t think you’d wake,” she said. “That injury was so horrible! I’ve never seen anyone survive something like that. Not even long enough for infection to kill them.”

“Not,” Geralt said, “safe yet.” He twitched his arm, and Jaskier interpreted the gesture and set the saddlebag down within his reach, and even flipped it open for him. Moved by a half-thought-out impulse, he reached over and instead of putting his hand into the saddlebag, he took Jaskier’s hand in his and held it for a moment. 

Jaskier gave him a startled look, but then his expression softened and he squeezed Geralt’s hand. He looked tired, and sad, and sick, his hair dirty and rumpled and his face pale but his cheeks flushed unhealthily. Hard to breathe. Geralt closed his eyes for a second, then squeezed Jaskier’s hand and let go.

He found a Swallow potion, and managed to get it out. The healer took it from his hand, when he couldn’t raise his arm, and looked at it. “What is this?”

“They heal him,” Jaskier said, “and they’re poison, that’s all I really know.”

“What, just-- magically heal him?” She looked interested. “Why didn’t he take one earlier?”

“Did,” Geralt said. “Not enough.”

She uncorked it and helped him drink it, and he swallowed with difficulty, having to stop to breathe. His lungs weren’t quite working right, neither of them, and he’d lost an enormous amount of blood. Healing potions could do a lot but they couldn’t replace massive volumes of blood, not entirely. He needed water, and he needed food, and he needed to meditate to focus specifically on what he needed to heal, but first he had to improve enough to get a fucking breath. He was dizzy and sick with the lack of air and the shortage of blood. 

“Note,” he managed to say, “the time, I need to-- keep track of time.” 

The healer pulled out her timepiece, and read it off. “You got here about twelve hours ago,” she said, “in the evening. It’s morning now.”

They hadn’t found the other corpse pile. The soldiers would be dead if they were out there without protection or backup. “Fuck,” Geralt said, staring helplessly at the far wall. The Swallow felt cold, then hot in his chest, more so than usual, and he grimaced as it intensified the burning in all of his joints. He’d fucked himself up, not just with the big obvious wounds but with the whole thing. It had been a long fight, and he’d layered the effects of a number of potions, and that was what he normally did but he’d had to overdo it just to survive and he was going to be feeling the effects for a while. Even if he hadn’t taken that scurver straight to the face he’d’ve been in rough shape today. The potion that increased his strength made him damage joints and muscles. The potion that increased the intensity of his Signs depleted something deep inside him that would take days to come back. And the one he’d taken near the end, that one made him able to keep moving through all the damage and gave him inadvisable speed on top of it, and had probably helped him shred a bunch of muscle tissue and cartilage.

He’d be flat out for days, even if he could get the hole in his lung to close up.

And the countryside was absolutely crawling with necrophages, and there was no way Captain Benrick and his earnest troop of well-behaved cavalryman would stand a fucking chance.

“But there’s another Witcher,” the healer said. 

Geralt blinked. “There is?”

“You probably know each other, don’t you,” she said, as if that had never occurred to her. 

“Generally,” Geralt said. Eskel. Please be Eskel. 

Lambert would be all right. He’d give Geralt shit, but Geralt would gladly take shit.

Bors, maybe, he was a Griffin, Geralt had worked with him a time or two, decent guy at least. Or… Coen? He remembered a Coen, a quiet fellow, he was all right. 

Lambert had a Cat Witcher he sometimes hung out with, and thought they didn’t know about, and Geralt didn’t know his name but he knew Lambert wasn’t that stupid. Whoever that guy was, he’d be better than nothing right now, Cat or no.

“There aren’t many of us left,” Geralt said after that moment of contemplation. “Odds are high I know him.”

“Mm, I’ll try to find out his name,” the healer said. “May I examine you? I’m quite concerned about you.” She caught his hand and looked at his fingers. They were fairly battered, though mostly healed-over. She pressed down on one of his fingernails, watching as the blood returned underneath. 

“Mm,” Geralt said, “I need fluids, to replace the lost blood.”

“These are bluer than I’d like,” she said. 

“They will be,” he said. “Magical healing can’t make something out of nothing.”

She put her fingers to the pulse point on his wrist, and frowned, moving them several times. 

“My normal resting pulse is very slow,” Geralt said. “Be patient, you’ll feel it.”

She gave him an annoyed look, which he understood-- obviously, she knew where a pulse point was-- but left her fingers there, and her frown turned to one of concentration. “That’s-- how are you alive?” she asked.

“I’m a mutant,” Geralt said. He took an experimental deeper breath. Better. 

“I need to listen to your heart,” she said. “May I?”

Geralt blinked at her. “If you want,” he said. She leaned in and put her ear carefully against his chest, over the bandages. It was-- he hadn’t really been mentally prepared for that, and lay stiffly, slightly uncomfortable, with her hair in his face smelling faintly of oil soap, and her ear pressed against his ribs slightly to the left of his sternum. He glanced over at Jaskier, who was laughing silently at him. He frowned.

“Your face, Geralt,” Jaskier said. “She’s not going to bite you.”

After a long moment, the healer sat up again, looking thoughtful. “Your lung sounds aren’t good,” she said.

“My lungs aren’t good,” he said. 

“I suppose that’s no surprise, then,” she said. 

Geralt summoned all his strength, and managed to sit up all the way. It took a lot of effort, but it meant he could reach over and take the cup from the floor and drink the rest of it. Jaskier was leaning against the wall, looking flushed, wan and tired, and amused about something. 

The healer flapped her hands at him. “What are you doing! You’re almost dead, will you lie still?”

“You’re getting the real Witcher experience now,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt ignored them and drank the rest of the pitcher of water, then terrified the healer further by getting up to go to the privy on his own. Walking was a challenge, but one he was able to meet. 

It was about all he could do, and he came back and went back to sleep. 

The next two days passed largely in a haze. He drank prodigious quantities of water, ate, slept, meditated, and occasionally drank potions. He was almost out of Swallows, but he had most of the raw ingredients, and managed to coax the last component he was missing out of the healer-- he needed more celandine, and she did have a dried store of it. (Her name was Laira, so he’d been close. She kept examining him. After the third time she’d listened to his heartbeat he started to suspect she was actually flirting. He decided he needed to be able to maintain consciousness for more than an hour at a time before he could flirt back.)

So he made another batch of Swallow, as soon as he could feel that whatever that part was in him that cast Signs and let him heal himself and do other things like that-- it was magic, he knew that was what it was, but it wasn’t the same as what mages had, he was pretty sure-- as soon as he could feel that bit had regenerated. He let himself really sink into the meditation, focused some of his internal energies on actually healing the mass of scar tissue that was keeping his lung from inflating correctly, and when he came out of it, it was the middle of the night and Jaskier was crying.

It took him a little doing to figure out that the poor kid’s fever had spiked and he was delirious. It took him only a little longer to work out that Jaskier was so disoriented he thought he was somewhere else. He had already somewhat guessed that the guy had some kind of childhood trauma, but the disjointed terrified ramblings gave the impression that Geralt’s guess had been perhaps too correct. 

Feverfew tincture and some cool water helped soothe Jaskier a little. No one else was around; they were slightly isolated in this bay of the building, so Geralt dragged Jaskier’s pallet over and put his arm around the kid to soothe him. Jaskier fell back asleep with his head pillowed on the uninjured side of Geralt’s chest, and slept deeply this time. 

He was certainly sliding into the disease’s third stage, which would kill him or not depending on if he were strong enough. Geralt let himself stroke the young man’s too-warm, soft skin, and didn’t think about it. After a little while, he drifted off to sleep too.

He woke to sunlight and voices. Jaskier was a warm and surprisingly heavy weight, and had drooled somewhat in his sleep. But his fever was lower, for the moment, and his heart rate seemed normal enough, for a sleeping human. Geralt managed to slide out from under him, and for the first time in several days, felt competent to dress himself. 

Walking was a little bit of an adventure, but he got himself out to where the voices were. Laira was in the midst of explaining something at great length to a man, but the man didn’t have to speak for Geralt to know him-- he could only see part of the back of his head, and one shoulder, but he was already moving. 

“ _Eskel_ ,” Geralt said, and Eskel turned with a smile to see him.

“Fuck, you look like shit, brother,” Eskel said, embracing him.

Geralt closed his eyes and buried his face in Eskel’s neck, holding on tightly. “No surprise there,” he said. 

“You smell fucking awful,” Eskel said, holding onto him tightly and rocking back and forth a couple of times. He let go, at last, and stepped back a little, holding Geralt’s shoulders and frowning at him as he looked him up and down. “Hells, you really got shredded.”

“I took a scurver to the fucking face,” Geralt said. “After fucking, eight hours of fighting.”

“I heard about that,” Eskel said. “Captain Benderick or whatever his name is was really, uh. Kinda poetic about it. He really likes you, Geralt.”

“I saved his fucking ass,” Geralt said. “He _should_ like me.”

“Andrey always said your shitty _Quen_ would be the death of you someday,” Eskel said, patting him on the shoulder. 

“Hey, fuck you,” Geralt said.

“A good _Quen’d_ mean a scurver could go off in your face and you’d be fine,” Eskel said, with a shrug.

“You smug asshole,” Geralt said. 

“Bet you took so much Petri’s Philter your eyes were crossed with it,” Eskel said, “and you still fizzled.”

“After _eight fucking hours_ ,” Geralt said.

“I see you two know each other,” Laira interjected, leaning into their field of vision.

Eskel glanced over at her, expression gone neutral, and touched the wolf medallion at his neck, raising an eyebrow. Geralt, a bit used to her, gave her a wry half-smile. “Yes, we’ve known one another a long time,” he said. “Is it still bad out there?”

“It’s not ideal,” Eskel said, “but the Count sent more men, and most of the outlying settlements affected have been discovered by now. Yes, there was another concentration of dead just where you’d told the good Captain there must be, and they had managed to find and burn that by themselves.”

“Good,” Geralt said. 

“Sit the fuck down,” Eskel said, “you look horrible.” He held Geralt by the shoulder and steered him to a bench and made him sit. Geralt let him, because he was feeling a little light-headed. He leaned back against the wall and breathed, focusing on deliberately calming his heartbeat. 

Eskel sat beside him, and pressed his shoulder gently against Geralt’s. He wasn’t wearing his spiked armor, just a quilted jerkin, and his shoulder was warm and solid. Laira stood in front of them a moment, hands on her hips. “I’m going to go check on my patients,” she said, “but I have a few more things I wanted to ask you, Eskel, before you go.”

“All right,” Eskel said mildly, watching her walk away. He turned back to Geralt. “You have, of course, charmed her.”

“Have I?” Geralt said. “I’ve mostly been unconscious, I think.”

Eskel shook his head, scarred face creasing in worry. “You almost died,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

Geralt did, reeling off the quantities and types of monsters, explaining what potions he took and when, what damage he sustained and how well the potions corrected it. Eskel listened attentively, alternately grim and horrified. “It really was a scurver?”

“It was,” Geralt confirmed. “Kept the spike they pulled out of my lung as a trophy. Want to see it?”

“No,” Eskel said, horrified. 

Geralt laughed at him, and finished his account. Eskel by now had his elbows on his knees, shaking his head. 

“That was a close call,” he said. 

“Good old Raffard’s,” Geralt said. 

“You were almost too far gone for that to work, from the sound of it,” Eskel said. “And what if those soldiers hadn’t helped you? You know their kind usually don’t.”

“Well,” Geralt said. 

“You shouldn’t have stayed in one place like that,” Eskel said. “That’s just-- too high a concentration to fight. You have to walk away sometimes.”

“I couldn’t walk away,” Geralt said. “There were twenty people in that barn.”

Eskel looked steadily at him for a moment, then shook his head slightly, and looked away. “It’s not your fault there was a fucking corpse pile,” he said. 

“It wasn’t those people’s fault either,” Geralt said. 

Eskel shook his head again, but didn’t answer. Geralt was trying to think of what to say when he heard singing, and in a moment, Pira came into the room with two buckets of water, and set them down near the basin.

“Good morning, Pira,” Geralt said, as she turned.

“Gllllllt!” she trilled in delight. She couldn’t manage quite all the sounds of his name, but had settled on mostly just the one, a drawn-out L that was both consonant and vowel, and it was charming. She turned to look at him, all lit up, and then paused, looking at Eskel with wide eyes and a frozen expression. She didn’t like strangers, and she was afraid of men she didn’t know. 

Geralt smiled at her. “This is my brother Eskel,” he said. “I’m so glad he’s here.”

Pira looked warily back and forth between the two Witchers. “Gllllt _brother_ ,” she said, surprised. 

“Yes,” Geralt said. “Eskel, this is Pira. She is our fire-tending expert, and is also very good at tending goats. Pira, Eskel is also very good with goats, he’s the only one who can get ours into their pen back home.”

Pira laughed in delight, rocking a little and clapping her hands. Despite himself, Eskel was smiling now. “Goats make _sense_ ,” he said, not for the first time in his life. 

“Big brother?” Pira asked, pointing at Eskel and looking at Geralt. “Little brother?”

Geralt glanced at Eskel, but it was clear Eskel hadn’t understood. “Are you my big brother or little brother?” Geralt said. 

Eskel made a face. “I’m older than you,” he said, “so I’m your big brother.”

“You’re not older than me,” Geralt said. It was a well-worn argument. Neither of them knew their birthdate. Vesemir was certain Geralt had been born in the autumn. Eskel had come to them a little later, and had been acquired by a different old Witcher, who hadn’t passed along any particular knowledge of his family save that they were all dead, but Eskel remembered that his birthday was in the spring. Whether he’d’ve been born the spring previous to or after Geralt’s autumn was a lifelong point of contention, though Vesemir generally recollected that he’d been likely a little older than Geralt, by his teeth, but then there was always variation in that sort of thing. It was the sort of thing that got debated during long winters when absolutely everything that mattered had already long been chewed-over, because it absolutely did not matter but neither of them would concede. 

“I am,” Eskel said. “I’m the big brother.” Geralt looked at Pira and shook his head slightly, making his face mock-serious.

Pira looked amused, Geralt rather thought, and nodded to herself. “Brothers,” she said. Then she looked at Geralt again. “Gllllt better,” she said. “Liara said you hurt pretty bad.”

“I was,” Geralt said. “I’m mostly better.”

Pira flapped her hands delightedly again, did a little pirouette, and left the room. Eskel gave Geralt a quizzical look. “Your new best friend?”

“Found the rest of her family dead of the plague, and she was either immune or not badly affected,” Geralt said. “She’d kept taking care of the livestock and tending the fire but didn’t know how to feed or bathe herself, and couldn’t help the others as they died.”

Eskel sat in silence for a moment, and then said, “I fucking _hate_ plagues.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone's holding up as shit slowly (or not so slowly?) Really Gets Real. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
> 
> I wanted to share that I got a Tumblr message from someone who wanted to remain anonymous-- in gratitude for the joy my writing has given them (!!) they gave a donation to their local food bank. I was _extremely_ honored by this and remain completely delighted and in fact being able to write this acknowledgement was a big motivation for me to finally figure out how to post at least some of this recalcitrant chapter, so-- 
> 
> I won't tell you to do anything, and I am just currently not reliable enough to feel I can pledge to do anything organized like writing for one of the fic exchanges for donations or anything like that, but I fully encourage you, if you're secure, to do something for those in your community who aren't. And if you're not secure, call / write to your government representatives as much as you can. There's so much going on, and so many people are in so much danger-- I encourage you to take up a cause on behalf of the most vulnerable in this epidemic. (Decarceration, food instability, government accountability-- there's a lot to choose from and I can't tell you which is more important!)  
> We are only as safe as the least safe person in our society, is the takeaway lesson from all of this.


	7. Chapter 7

It was another two days before Eskel would let Geralt come out with him, and even then, he mostly made Geralt stay on the horse and largely not involve himself in any of the actual work. Geralt groused about Eskel’s overprotectiveness, but was glad of being spoiled; his lungs continued bad, and that first night he had a coughing fit so bad he briefly lost consciousness, and he coughed up a disturbing quantity of… material. Eskel had brought him back to the makeshift hospital for the night, and so was present and sat with him through the whole thing. Geralt was glad of that; he couldn’t imagine having anyone else see him like that. But Eskel’s hand on the back of his neck through most of it kept him as calm as he could be, and when he came out of the brief gray spell of having passed out, he was being held steadily against Eskel’s shoulder, drooling blood into a clean towel as his body kept reflexively trying to breathe without his input.

“Did you get it all out?” Eskel asked quietly.

Geralt just breathed in shallow gasps, trying not to set himself off anymore. Physical injury didn’t frighten him, but the prospect of being debilitated did. Eskel let go of the back of his neck and smoothed his hand back and forth across Geralt’s back, back and forth, and Geralt closed his eyes and tried to match his stuttering, tripping heartbeat to Eskel’s slow steady pulse, tried to breathe slower and deeper. 

It set him off again in a moment, and he coughed and coughed, bent double, rocking back and forth as he tried to clear the obstruction and keep breathing enough to stay conscious. Eskel kept a hand on his back, quiet and steady, and Geralt gagged and spat and choked and finally dragged in a deep breath, ragged but full. He sat up, tipping his head back, and after a moment, found a still-clean corner of the towel to clean his bloody mouth. 

“Better,” Eskel said. 

Geralt sat with his hands braced on his legs for a long moment, just breathing, and finally said, hoarse, “Better.”

  
  


Jaskier faded in and out of consciousness most of the time. Geralt sat with him in the dawn watches, mostly, when he was back from hunting with Eskel. He was lucid first thing in the morning, some mornings, but so drawn, so thin, so tired. Sometimes he would pick at invisible things on the blankets, eyes roaming uncertainly. 

Lukas, the healer, had survived and mostly recovered, and sought Geralt out to tell him that Pira’s father and brother were alive and had sent word they would come to get her soon. “Did you really draw them a picture of who had survived?” Lukas asked.

“Yes,” Geralt said. “Well, I didn’t know-- if you couldn’t read, and came home to your house empty and smelling of death, wouldn’t you want to know?”

“Oh,” Lukas said, “of course, and as they can’t read, it _was_ incredibly helpful. I just-- they brought the note and the drawing to the Viscount and he was very impressed.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. 

“You did what?” Eskel had been meditating, Geralt thought, but clearly wasn’t now. Geralt explained, and Eskel just looked at him, then went back to meditating in the corner.

Geralt had a feeling that one was going to wind up one of Eskel’s winter stories he dragged out at an inopportune moment. He opted not to consider what Lambert would say. 

Vesemir might like it, though.

The epidemic mostly petered out, at least locally, and Eskel and Geralt spent a whole night hunting without finding any necrophages. “I think I’ll move on,” Eskel said, as they rode back. “You can sort out the money with the local authorities, or whatever-- unless you want to come with me?”

“Where you headed?” Geralt asked. It would be nice, to stick with Eskel a bit. They didn’t overlap much on the Path, usually, except by prior arrangement. 

“Thinking of heading down Toussaint way a bit, I was down there hunting wyverns before and I think there’s more,” Eskel said. “Decent-ish reward, and a good chance to stock up on some components for things.”

“Mm,” Geralt said. Toussaint was nice enough, good weather. 

“We could find somewhere down there to winter over,” Eskel said. “Cold’s hard on a damaged lung, remember I had that injury a few years ago?”

“Vaguely,” Geralt said. Eskel had breathed poison and hadn’t gotten the remedy quite in time, and had gotten scarring in his lungs, as Geralt remembered, but he hadn’t see him much around that time. Probably that was why, he’d gone south to winter. 

“Trust me,” Eskel said, “you really don’t want to be struggling through that mountain pass with your lungs all fucked-up. It is not nice.”

“Fair,” Geralt said. He was hoping to heal up soon, but it seemed to be slow going. 

“So what do you say?” Eskel said. “Come south with me? We can leave by midday, I’ll get the Count to pay up.”

Geralt thought about what of his effects he’d need to pack up, and then thought of Jaskier. “I don’t know if the danger’s over here, yet,” he said. Jaskier’s fever had mostly dropped now, but he was so weak he could barely walk to the privy and back. He needed some time to regain his strength. 

It seemed likely he’d survive, but the healer hadn’t pronounced him cured yet. He wasn’t out of danger.

Eskel gave him a long, considering look. “The epidemic’s mostly moved on,” he said, “and nobody’s being stupid about corpses now, so there aren’t necrophages to fight. They don’t need us, and they don’t even need you.”

“I’d rather see it through a bit longer,” Geralt said. 

“Are you fucking that bard yet?” Eskel asked. “I mean, when he’s not dying of plague?” Geralt frowned at him, and Eskel laughed. “Come on! I know who you arrived with and I know who you’re sleeping next to and sitting up spooning broth into. You don’t think _I’d_ judge you?”

“He’s a kid,” Geralt said stiffly. 

“He’s a bonny twenty-three,” Eskel said. “I looked at the healer’s notes. He was born in 1222.”

“It’s not that,” Gerald said. “I’m not-- if I wanted to fuck somebody,” but he didn’t really know how else to explain it. 

Eskel shook his head. “I know,” he said, “we don’t talk about this shit. Anyway the healer wants to bang you, she more or less said as much, so I recommend that as a way to pass the time if you’re hanging about here. If you change your mind, I’ll be in Toussaint.”

Geralt took the healer up on it, a couple of days later. She was, in fact, quite eager, and not entirely because of scientific curiosity about his particulars. He was recovered enough to show her a decently good time, though he had to steer clear of anything too athletic-- still, he had other talents, when it came to that sort of thing, and she certainly seemed well-satisfied. 

He went back to the pallet on the floor where he’d been sleeping, next to Jaskier. Jaskier rolled over as he slid into his bed, and yawned. “Geralt?”

“Mm?”

Jaskier yawned. “Liara said I’m probably not contagious anymore.”

“Does that mean you’re cured?” Geralt asked, skeptical.

“I mean,” Jaskier said, “a stiff breeze could kill me at this point, but the fever itself is done.” He sighed, and sat up. “I feel like I’ve been lying in this bed for fucking _years_.”

“I don’t disagree,” Geralt said. “Well, I’m finished here. We can go when you’re ready. I’ll travel with you a ways, make sure nothing eats you. Where did you have in mind?”

“That would be fantastic,” Jaskier said. “Actually, I _was_ thinking of a place...”

They set out the next day, Geralt with Roach and Jaskier with an extremely mild-mannered horse, placid to the point of nearly being dead. Geralt had given Eskel a lot of the reward money, but his own purse was pleasantly heavy as well. And, mostly, he could breathe now; he’d been able to stop dosing himself with potions and just made time daily to meditate. 

The first day they only made it a few hours down the road, and stopped at an inn, and Jaskier had to sleep two hours before he came down and played a grand total of five songs to the assemblage. It was a light assemblage anyway, but appreciative, and then Jaskier was so exhausted Geralt picked him up halfway up the staircase and carried him the rest of the way to the room they were sharing. The kid was light and frail, like a pile of sticks, and made only faint noises of protest. He was asleep before Geralt finished getting his boots off him.

The next day they made it a little farther, and the day after that a little farther still. At least Jaskier had a good appetite now, and with his purse heavy, Geralt had no compunction about buying decent supplies. The fourth night, they didn’t reach a town, so they camped out. Jaskier felt well enough to play the lute for a little while, and then suddenly paused and frowned. 

“What?” Geralt asked.

“Sounds off,” he said. “A rattle, somewhere.” He looked in the sound hole, which was a delicate tracery of openings, and then looked up at the tuning pegs. “Huh!” 

He picked at one of the strings, and after a moment, uncoiled a tiny slip of paper. “I can’t read that,” he said in disgust, after tilting it toward the light.

Geralt held out his hand, and Jaskier handed it over after only a moment’s hesitation.

“She eats them,” he read, and then burst out laughing, throwing his head back to really get it out. 

“What does that mean?” Jaskier demanded. “She eats what? _Who_ eats what?”

“Oh,” Geralt said, eventually recovering himself and handing the slip of paper back over. “That was probably Liara’s solution to how to tell you the answer to the riddle in case you lived.”

“That’s the solution to the riddle,” Jaskier said. “The riddle that I don’t know what the riddle even _was_. The riddle you had to tell me on your deathbed! But only the answer to! Are you trying to kill me now?”

Gerat was laughing too hard now to answer, and only a small coughing fit finally reined him in. “Come on,” he said, a little feebly, waving a hand, “come on, Jaskier. What did I promise to tell you, but only if you lived? What have you been pestering me to know, for literal _years_ now?”

“I don’t know!” Jaskier said, flinging his hands wide. “Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?”

“Come on,” Geralt said. “You taught me all of those poetical terms about it.”

“Poetical terms,” Jaskier said, baffled.

Geralt considered it, now. To name a horse after a notable foodstuff she preferred, was that a metaphor? “I suppose it is metonymy,” he said. 

“ _Roach_ ,” Jasker shouted suddenly, and it was a good thing horses didn’t particularly care about answering to their names. It was also a good thing there weren’t likely to be necrophages in these woods, or anything else for that matter, because they could have heard him for miles. “Oh by the _gods_ , that’s it? That’s _it_? She _eats_ them?”

“She eats them,” Geralt said. 

“Aargh,” Jaskier said, flinging his arms wide, and then flopping back against the log he had his back propped against. “Argh oh by Melitele’s _tits_ I can’t believe you made me wait _years_ for that stupid punchline!”

Geralt was laughing too hard to answer, and after a moment Jaskier started laughing too. “You ass,” he managed to gasp, after a little while. “You fucking _ass_.”

Geralt wheezed, and flapped a hand vaguely. “There’s,” he said, and wheezed again. He hadn’t laughed so hard since he and Eskel were kids doing stupid shit and getting in trouble for it. He managed to sit up, wheezed through a minor coughing fit, started laughing again, and finally collapsed back against his own backrest log, gasping for breath. 

“You think you’re so funny,” Jaskier groused, but he was laughing too hard to pull off the disgruntled look he was going for. “Ah! You ass.”

Geralt recovered himself and sat up, clearing his throat and getting his breathing back to normal, and then he glanced over at Jaskier and started laughing again, helplessly. 

“Fuck you,” Jaskier said. 

“Oh,” Geralt said, “but there’s a story,” and he had to stop to wheeze. “Oh no. Oh dear. Oh.” 

“Get yourself under control, man,” Jaskier said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

Geralt dragged a hand down his face, making a genuine effort to compose himself. “Of course,” he said, and cleared his throat. He looked over at Jaskier, foolishly assuming it was safe, and burst out into laughter with a terrible squeaking noise. “Oh no,” he said, laughing helplessly. “Oh no. _Years_.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes, and started playing the lute again. Geralt collapsed back against his log and stared at the sky, wheezing a little in laughter. “I’m glad you’re getting so much joy out of this,” Jaskier said, a bit tartly, but Geralt could tell he wasn’t really upset. 

“Oh,” Geralt said, wiping his eyes. “Oh, I haven’t laughed like that in-- oh--” 

“I wasn’t aware you were capable of noises like that,” Jaskier said. 

“Hmm,” Geralt said, feeling the faint creaking noise in his chest as his lungs protested. He was a ways from healed, yet. He wheezed quietly. “There was a funny story about it, that I was going to tell you, but.” He wheezed a little more. “I was drowning in my own blood, and wasn’t about to tell a bunch of humans who had just offered to kill me some rambling story about my horse.”

“Wait,” Jaskier said, “they offered to _kill_ you?”

“Mm,” Geralt said. “Well, to be fair, I had been impaled through the lung, and if I were human, I’d’ve had a very unpleasant forty-five minutes left, or so, at the _absolute_ most.” He wheezed quietly. “Their medic very kindly offered to give me tincture of poppy until my heart stopped, not realizing that for me it would probably take a gallon of the stuff and the better part of a day.”

“Oh tincture of poppy,” Jaskier said, a little wistfully. Geralt twisted his head to give him a look; he didn’t think the kid had ever been hooked on poppy. “I’ve only had it once or twice, I know it’s dangerous, but. I suppose that’s the way to go.”

“Should I have taken him up on it?” Geralt asked.

“No,” Jaskier said, horrified. “Geralt!”

Geralt sighed. “Nicest offer of death I’ve ever had,” he said. 

“Do you collect them?” Jaskier asked.

“Occupational hazard,” Geralt said. He sighed again, more of a wheeze really. Probably this wasn’t the easiest position to breathe in, but he was comfortable. He had himself a little more under control, though, and he felt bad that Jaskier seemed to think himself the butt of the joke. “There’s a story,” he said, “behind the Roach thing. Do you want to hear it?”

“A story,” Jaskier said, perking up a little. 

“Now, neither the plain answer nor the whole story is really worth all the build-up,” Geralt said. “So maybe you can understand why I decided it was much more entertaining not to give an answer.” He settled himself a little more comfortably, lacing his fingers together over his chest and wriggling his shoulders to settle them. 

Jaskier set aside his lute and sat forward a little. “I do understand that it was fun to have a little inside joke about it,” he conceded graciously, “But I would like to hear the story anyhow.”

“Mm.” Geralt yawned, and contemplated how to begin. “So, when I was a young Witcher, first on the Path--”

“What’s the Path,” Jaskier said. “You refer to it a lot.”

Geralt glanced over at him, considering that. “Oh,” he said. “It means-- it’s what we do. Witchers travel the Path. It just means-- we’re active Witchers, I guess.”

“You could just say you’re Out Witchering,” Jaskier said, leaning his cheekbone on his hand.

“It’s not a verb,” Geralt said, “it’s a noun. We don’t Witcher, we _are_ Witchers. It’s not like it’s just a job.”

“So you _do_ know parts of speech,” Jaskier said, frowning.

“I know nouns and verbs,” Geralt said. “But we’re not talking about my education. Or do you not want the story?”

“Oh, no, I do,” Jaskier said. “So when you first set out upon this Path-- it’s got a capital P, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Geralt said, “always.”

“The Path. Got it,” Jaskier said, with the air of a man who was making mental notes that would be physical if it weren’t too dark for him to see to write.

“I set out upon the Path on foot,” Geralt said. “Right away, I knew that I should get myself a horse, as I had rather a lot of baggage to carry. Acquiring a horse proved challenging, as a decent one proved rather expensive, until I happened upon a small village where they asked me to remove a curse on a horse.”

“What kind of curse?” Jaskier asked. 

“That’s the thing,” Geralt said. “The horse wasn’t cursed. She was just an asshole.”

“And you knew she had to be yours,” Jaskier said.

“Well,” Geralt said. “So this was a young mare who had acquired a habit of checking the fish-traps along the creek, and emptying them, eating all the fish in them. Her favorites were the roaches. She’d begun the habit while accompanying a man who’d gone to fish. He put the baskets with his catches down near her, preparing to load her up for the return trip, and she ate the fish. This is not a terribly normal thing for a horse to do, but it’s also not that abnormal.”

“Oh!” Jaskier said. “So, you said, this is terribly unbreakable so I should just take her away to keep you all safe!”

Geralt sighed. “When have I ever lied to anyone about a curse or a monster?” he said.

Jaskier considered that. “Never?” he said. 

“Never,” Geralt said. “I told them the truth. I said, this horse isn’t cursed, she’s just an asshole.”

“And then they gave her to you?” Jaskier guessed.

“No,” Geralt said, “but they did sell her pretty cheaply, because they all thought I was lying that she wasn’t cursed.” 

Jaskier laughed. “A little polishing could make that quite a good story indeed,” he said. 

“Well, I don’t polish stories,” Geralt said. 

“No, that’s my job,” Jaskier said.

Geralt contemplated that. This was likely to end up a song, and in it, all sorts of ridiculous things would be alleged, which had never happened. He sighed again. “In the song,” he said, “can you at least not make me a liar? I don’t like it when people think I’d lie about things.”

“I won’t make you a liar,” Jaskier promised. They sat in companionable silence, and Geralt started to consider getting out his bedroll. “Ah, one more question,” Jaskier said. 

“What?”

“How many Roaches ago was that first one?”

Geralt considered it for a moment, and sat up. “I don’t,” he said, uneasy. “I don’t like to-- count them. I don’t keep track like that.”

“It was not the same horse, though,” Jaskier said. 

“No,” he said. “She-- no.” He hadn’t done the math in a while. But it had probably been sixty years or more since then. That was… significantly longer than any horse’s lifespan.

“It’s been the same horse since I met you, though,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt looked over at him, and then looked over at their horses, secured to a picket line between the trees. Roach was asleep, on her feet. Jaskier’s horse was lying down, like the lazy lump it was. “Yes,” he said. “I’d replaced her not long before.”

“How long do you usually have the same horse?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt let his breath out, and said, “Jaskier, the way I keep it from bothering me is by not thinking about it.”

“I suppose talking about it precludes that option,” Jaskier said.

Geralt considered that, stumbling briefly over the vocabulary. “Yes,” he said.

“Can you tell me the one true thing I wanted to ask about your life, instead?” Jaskier asked. “Since you’re being nice to me?”

“You’re pushing it now, bard,” Geralt said, and got to his feet to see about setting up bedrolls.

“That’s not a no,” Jaskier said. “Ohh, I’ve got to make this count!”

“As I said before,” Geralt said, spreading a blanket over the nicely-trimmed pine boughs he’d assembled before dark, “if it counts too much, there’s no way I’m answering it.”

“There’s a lot in your life that works by you not thinking about it too much,” Jaskier pointed out, this time being wise enough not to make it into a question.

“Well,” Geralt said, “it works, so.” 

“So, something true that isn’t something you’re carefully not thinking about,” Jaskier said. “Hmmm… If I pick one you can’t answer do I get to try again?”

Geralt didn’t quite growl, but he made a low disgruntled noise. “Maybe I don’t want to play a game.”

“Okay okay,” Jaskier said, sitting up straight and holding his hands out, palms-outward, arms wide. “Pick one: Where do you go in the winters, _or_ , how old were you when you had your first kiss.”

“Cheating,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier let his arms fall. “Come on,” he said, a little pleading, but appealingly so, and Geralt hated that it worked on him. 

He considered his options. “Twelve,” he said. One of the older Witchers wintering at Kaer Morhen had been shamelessly addicted to romantic adventure stories, and he and Eskel had read several of them and they had been full of fairly explicit, though in hindsight laughably euphemistic, love scenes. It wasn’t that he’d never seen anyone kiss anyone; the children kissed one another and sometimes an adult kissed one of the really little ones, but this was the first time he’d really understood that adults kissed one another in a different way. He and Eskel had decided to practice, because when they went out in to the world they’d meet women who would expect to be wooed like this, and even if they weren’t going to marry any of them, the older Witchers talked about “bedding” lasses and whores and such, and it all seemed like something that one ought to practice. And they’d made several experiments, but after a bit of it, Eskel had gotten impatient at Geralt’s silliness and had pinned him down and kissed him thoroughly, and both of them had very abruptly understood what the point of it was. 

“Twelve,” Jaskier said, perking up. “Really! With who?”

“That’s a third question,” Geralt said. “I never said I’d answer more than one. That’s enough screwing around, you need to rest if we’re going to get anywhere tomorrow. Look, I’ve put our bedrolls together so you won’t freeze, now come and settle down.”

“You’re so mean,” Jaskier said. “Er, about the questions, not about the-- thank you, I’m glad not to freeze, that’s very considerate of you.”

Geralt very carefully did not ask Jaskier about _his_ first kiss, because the way their relationship worked was largely by a studious lack of curiosity on his own part. He wasn’t going to break that now just because both of them had nearly died. That was why he hadn’t wanted to talk about where he spent his winters, either-- because that would entail explaining a lot about his own background, and then Jaskier would probably reciprocate, and they’d both know too much. No, it was better not to mess with things that worked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised Geralt ice cream in this story, though he doesn't know it yet.  
> Should be one more chapter. We'll see. I split it here, because I needed to feel good and feel like all of you probably do too.


	8. Ice Cream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised, didn't I?

Geralt held out another day before he finally asked where they were headed. Jaskier gave him a surprised look. “You don’t know?”

“I don’t know this area well,” Geralt said, frowning. “I don’t know why, but I haven’t been this way.”

“Mm,” Jaskier said, “well then, you’ll see shortly. We must be nearly there.”

_There_ was, as it turned out, a suspiciously tidy-looking, prosperous little town, tucked up nicely in a bend in a river valley, very built-up and well-taken-care-of. “Hm,” Geralt said suspiciously. The streets were very straight, bordered with stones, and there were decorative gardens. 

Jaskier led the way confidently down the very tidy streets, through several turnings into increasingly nicer and nicer neighborhoods, with large tidy houses-- clearly, merchants and nobles lived in these houses, and Geralt pulled his hood up even though it wasn’t chilly, because he was consumed with a certainty that this was the kind of place he’d be driven out of with stones. 

Jaskier led them right through a particularly imposing gate, into a fenced-in complex of multiple buildings. It wasn’t… a private dwelling, but it was fancy, with a device on the gates and above the arched doorways of the buildings. 

A groom came out to take their horses. “Jaskier,” Geralt said warily.

Jaskier glanced over, and said, “Oh, Geralt, don’t you look cunning! That’s perfect, everyone will think you’re someone really important going incognito. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Greetings, visitors,” the groom said, looking from one to the other of them with a notable lack of curiosity.

Jaskier looked at him, then did a double-take. “Why-- is it Jan, still? After all these years?”

The groom blinked up at him. “It can’t be,” he said, face gone blank in disbelief.

“It is,” Jaskier said, and dismounted. “I’m going by Jaskier nowadays.”

“Why,” the groom said, “so you are-- why, it’s so good to see you!”

“I’m glad to see you’re still here and well,” Jaskier said. “It has been a long time.”

“Young master,” the groom said, “it’s Himself you’ll be wanting to talk to, is it? He’ll be so delighted to see you.”

“It is,” Jaskier said, “thank you, Jan. Do you know where he is at the moment?”

“He’d be t’the Rose Hall, likely,” the groom said. “That glad to see you, he’d be.”

These must be friends of Jaskier’s, Geralt thought. Well, good; it would be well to leave him in the care of someone friendly. He only reluctantly turned Roach over, making to pull his saddlebags off.

“Oh, sir, we’ll take the luggage up t’the room for ye, there’s no cause to worry,” the groom said. 

“It’s all right, Geralt,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt let go of the saddlebags. “She bites,” he told the man. 

“Ah, she won’t be the first,” the groom said knowingly, and took her by a short grip on the reins, prudently. 

Jaskier led Geralt unerringly across the courtyard. “My family used to come here every year when I was a boy,” he said. “I haven’t come with them in years but I was always quite close with the proprietor, and I’ve written him letters a few times.”

“So you’ll be safe, staying here to recuperate,” Geralt said.

“For a little bit, at least.” Jaskier glanced over and flashed Geralt a grin. “He’ll have no compunction about putting it on my family’s tab. But that means I’ve got to move on before he sends the bill along. Wouldn’t do for the old man to know where to find me while I’m still there.”

Geralt wanted, rather badly, to ask about literally any of that, but that was how this worked, so he didn’t. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you settled, but if you’re sure you’re safe here--”

“Oh, no no no,” Jaskier said, and reached out and grabbed Geralt by the forearm. “No, my friend, you’re staying here with me at _least_ long enough for me to show you what’s so great about this place.”

What was so great about this place was that there was a hot spring. There weren’t just baths, there were a series of pools, separated off into several streams, cascading gently from one to the next in several separate nooks in an echoing cavern that wasn’t really a cavern at all but a stone building with translucent panels in the roof so it was light and airy and had trees planted alongside the pools. Each cascade contained a series of pools organized into very hot, tolerably hot, pleasantly hot, lukewarm, cool, and frigid. You could go in and out of any of them, in any order. 

Geralt stood staring at them in complete blankness for a long moment, as Jaskier’s friend, the proprietor, a very sweet-voiced and swishy old man with a great deal of commentary on people Geralt didn’t know, enumerated the purported health benefits of all of them.

“We can go in there,” he said to Jaskier finally, not quite believing it. It was a fancy place for rich people, clearly, but no one else was here now.

“Of course,” the proprietor said. “Listen, Witcher, we have all kinds through here, and it’s past the fashionable season so you’ve got the place mostly to yourself for a couple of days, most likely.”

Jaskier was just grinning at him. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “And it’s just the thing for a lung injury.”

“Ooh, you poor thing,” the proprietor said. “It is, it is indeed. And you, Buttercup my boy, you look _terribly_ poorly, were you in that sickness?”

“I was,” Jaskier said solemnly. “Oh, Solon, I almost died. I’ll wash well before I go in, but the healer pronounced me no longer contagious two weeks ago.”

“That’s good,” Solon said. “That’s good. Ah, but it wasn’t in the lungs, was it?”

“No,” Geralt said. He looked at the old man, then, daring to make eye contact. “No, I literally got a lung injury. Got impaled.”

Solon’s eyebrows went up. “Well then, the healing waters are just the ticket for you. Now, you boys go and scrub with soap over there in the running water, get all the dirt off, and I’ll be right back with towels and things.”

“Ta,” Jaskier said, “Solon, you’re the best.”

“Ah, it’s just so good to see you again, my sweet,” Solon said, and he patted Jaskier’s cheek affectionately. “I worried at you, I did, all those years-- ach, and the old man’s face gets sourer by the year, and all I can think is _you threw that beautiful boy away_ , but I never say a word, of course--”

“I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way,” Jaskier said, and there was something gentle and tragic in his face. “Mind, I don’t know what he _does_ think, but I can assure you, he thinks the fault’s all mine.”

“Your mother seems to be in perfect health,” Solon said.

“More’s the pity,” Jaskier answered him, in a droll little drawl, mouth twisting in distaste as he turned away a little. His gaze lit on Geralt. “Ah, don’t wait for us to gossip, go ahead and get out of all that filthy gear, I’ll be right behind you. It’s through that door,” and he waved. 

Geralt hesitated a moment, but then, he didn’t know these people and it seemed wrong to eavesdrop on Jaskier’s family gossip. So he walked toward the door, listening to the old man go on about someone named Tristina and how her husband seemed to dote on her. “Surely there’ll be a child soon enough,” Solon will saying, “and that might mellow the old bitch out a bit.”

“I assure you,” Jaskier said, “that _nothing_ can mellow the old bitch out. I am quite certain a step-grandchild will not do the trick.”

“Ach,” Solon said, “she’s been her stepmother for twenty-four years now, you’d think she’d be reconciled to it.”

“You’d think a lot of things,” Jaskier said wearily, and the door shut behind Geralt so he heard no more.

It wasn’t his business. None of it was his business.

 _You threw that beautiful boy away_ . -- _He thinks the fault’s all mine._

Geralt was still working out how to use the taps-- running water, so one could wash oneself under a steady stream, and plentiful good-quality soap about as well-- when Jaskier came in, naked and cheerful. He was _so_ thin, Geralt had noticed it before but seeing him without clothing really drove home how skeletal he was at the moment. 

“Ah, it’s clockwise,” Jaskier said. 

“I had almost figured it out,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier grinned sunnily at him, and then paused, expression twisting into dismay as he looked at-- ah, the scar on Geralt’s chest. “Sweet holy Mother,” he said, and actually reached out and traced his finger very gently along the ragged edge of the healed scar where the scurver spine had lodged. 

“My ribs stopped most of it,” Geralt said, self-consciously forcing himself not to twitch away. 

“A human would be dead,” Jaskier confirmed, glancing up at his face. 

“Yes,” Geralt said. “Only the mutations kept me alive.”

“Well,” Jaskier said, and reached past him to turn the knob. “Thank the gods for them, then.”

The water was a little cooler than body temperature, and perfect for scrubbing dirt off with soap. Geralt stood under the stream of it far longer than he needed to in order to rinse, enjoying how clean it was. It smelled somewhat of minerals, but there was no contamination from anything on the surface of the earth in this water. It was absolutely clean. 

When he finally stepped out, Jaskier was standing there with an armload of towels, wrapped in a clean robe. “I knew you’d like that,” he said, with a look that could only be described as fond, and handed Geralt a robe that managed to actually mostly go around him, credibly at least.

“That pool’s too hot to go into for long,” Jaskier said. “Mostly it’s best to sit above it and breathe the steam, or-- see, there’s a bucket-- you dip some of the water out to make this pool a little bit warmer, but most people can’t really--”

Geralt shed his robe and climbed into the too-hot pool, and Jaskier laughed. “Of course,” he said.

“My body temperature’s higher than yours already,” Geralt pointed out, and settled himself down into the very, very hot water. It made him prickle all over, and he sank down into it with a heartfelt groan.

Jaskier climbed into the next pool over, leaning his arms on the narrow wall dividing them. “I don’t doubt that,” he said. He was tense, letting himself down into the water in little fits and pauses. “Ah, this one might be too hot for me too.”

“M’never coming out,” Geralt said, submerging himself to the ears. This made water spill over into the next pool, and Jaskier made little protesting noises.

“No,” he said, “no, I have to go one down,” and he laughingly climbed out and went into the pool farther along.

Geralt stayed where he was for a deeply pleasant long moment, but it felt wrong to isolate himself, so he slithered from the very hot pool into the pleasantly-hot pool, and submerged himself entirely for a moment. He couldn’t hold his breath any reasonable amount of time, so he surfaced and turned to look at Jaskier, who was leaning against the edge of the next-cooler pool, watching him in delight.

“That one’s okay too?” Jaskier asked.

“Mm,” Geralt said, and sat on the step so that he was submerged to the shoulders, leaning against the same wall as Jaskier. He could meditate here, he thought, and it would be extremely beneficial. Yes, he’d do that, in a bit. 

“You’re so pink,” Jaskier said, amused. “You never blush, I was wondering if you could.”

“It takes a lot,” Geralt said. Ah, the water was just baking the injury right out, and taking with it the last of the damage to all his muscles and joints, unlocking all the knots and kinks and pulls and spasms, all the old muscle damage, all the scar tissue adhesions. He breathed deeply, and settled himself down farther into the water. “This is a good place,” he said.

“It works by volcanic activity, did you know?” Jaskier said mildly. 

“No,” Geralt said, interested, and passed the next little while listening pleasantly as Jaskier explained how the earth’s molten core heated the water in the spring as it rose to the surface. 

He could hear Jaskier’s voice getting drowsier and drowsier, and finally turned to see that Jaskier was dozing off with his head against the edge of the pool. “Don’t fall in,” he said.

“Mmm,” Jaskier said. 

“Ah-ah-ah, my dear Buttercup,” Solon said, coming up next to the pool with a tray. “You know better. Don’t sleep in the hot pool. You can sit as long as you want in the next one down, but it’s not good for you to lose track of time in that one.”

“Mm,” Jaskier said, sighing and rubbing his eyes. “Ah! Solon, you’re the best.”

“I thought your trip might have been a long one,” Solon said, satisfied, as he set the tray down on a clever little stand he unfolded for the purpose. “Some refreshment.”

“Thank you,” Geralt said politely, accepting the cup. 

“A pitcher of cold water too,” Solon said, “it’s important to replenish your fluids internally while you’re soaking.”

“A good reminder,” Jaskier said sleepily. 

It was a lovely spread of fancy rich people food, but reasonable stuff-- nice cheeses, cured meats, fruits, nuts, little bits of bread. Geralt kept ahold of himself and slowly ate slightly less than half of what was on offer, and Jaskier picked lightly at it and kept adding water to his own wine. 

“I gotta go one cooler,” he said after a bit, and Geralt followed him to be companionable, moving the tray so they could both still reach it. This pool was still acceptable, warmer than his blood by a few degrees. 

“If you sleep,” Geralt said, “I’ll make sure you don’t drown.”

“Ah,” Jaskier said, “there’s a place to prop your head, in this pool. I’ll be fine.” And he settled himself in the spot that, sure enough, was clearly intended to accommodate an adult of average size for a nap.

“In that case,” Geralt said, “I’m going to meditate.”

“Oh, by all means,” Jaskier said airily, waving a hand.

An hour’s meditation in a pool slightly warmer than his blood did absolute wonders for Geralt’s entire constitution. He roused easily, ate everything left on the tray with a clear conscience, drank most of the pitcher of water, and then slid into the pool where Jaskier was semi-floating with his head propped carefully in a cradle. The water in this one was a little cooler than his own blood, but just about the same temperature as a human ought to be, he thought. He took one of Jaskier’s hands where it was floating limply to confirm his guess-- yes, it felt about like it should. 

Jaskier blinked awake. “Mm,” he said, and sat up. “How long’s it been?”

“An hour exactly,” Geralt said. 

Jaskier stretched. “Ah, you look well-meditated,” he said.

“That has a look?” Geralt asked. 

“It does,” Jaskier said, gesturing vaguely. “Hmm.” He yawned. “You have freckles.”

Geralt touched his face, which was stupid-- like he could feel them, somehow. “I do?”

“No,” Jaskier said, “on your-- on your shoulders.”

“I used to,” Geralt said. “On my face.” He hadn’t seen them very much, of course-- just in the one looking-glass in the bathing room, sometimes-- but it had been much commented-on when he’d lost them. 

They’d lasted through his first round of mutations, along with the color of his hair, but not the second. He’d lost all his pigment in that second round, just about.

“You outgrew them?” Jaskier said, yawning. 

Geralt considered that. “In a way,” he said. He slid a look sideways at Jaskier. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever discussed how one became a Witcher with the bard at all. Probably not. Now wasn’t the time either. 

Jaskier stretched luxuriously, even wriggling his fingers-- “If you don’t stretch your fingers, you didn’t really stretch,” he said, not for the first time-- and then sat up, looking pink and bright-eyed but not feverish. “It’s got to be about time for a meal. Let’s go see.”

“I, um,” Jaskier said as they went into a suite of rooms, “had them put us together in one suite, I hope you don’t mind that.”

“Why would I mind that?” Geralt asked.

Jaskier was still quite pink, possibly not just from the bath. “I, partly,” he said, with an air of confession. “Partly because it would be scandalous,” he admitted. “Not-- I’m sort of using you, Geralt, but not as you-- just as-- when he sends the bill and it’s two people and one room, there’ll be scandalous assumptions made and that suits my purpose. That’s all.”

“Is this to do with the way, when we first met, that you’d escaped an arranged marriage by outrageous scandal?” Geralt asked, dredging back into his memory. That was-- a couple of years ago, now. Several years, even.

“Yes,” Jaskier said. “I’m-- I want my family to know I’m not dead, but I really don’t want them to-- to try and get me back, you see?”

“I think I do,” Geralt said, and he felt tired and sad about it, but it wasn’t his business and he wasn’t going to ask for more details. 

“It’s not about who _you_ are,” Jaskier said, “it’s nothing to do with your reputation, mind-- just-- that it’s two people, and you’re a man, that’s all. But Solon’s discreet, he wouldn’t tell them your name even if he were threatened about it.”

“My reputation is what it is,” Geralt said. “I’m not worried.” He was worried for Jaskier, but it was pointless. There was nothing he could do. 

It did sting a little, to think that Jaskier’s family was obviously so wealthy, and the boy himself was so often dangerously short on money to the point of forgoing food and shelter. But freedom had a cost, obviously. Not that Geralt would know much about it. 

It didn’t bear thinking on.

“So you can’t stay here long,” Geralt said, as they dressed for dinner. The room was lovely-- the suite had a sitting room, a single bedroom with an enormous bed, and a balcony that looked out over a garden. “Where will you go after?”

“Oxenfurt,” Jaskier said, fussing with the waistband of his trousers, which hung loose on his horribly undersized frame. He glanced up. “I have-- that’s where I go, most winters. I have… I have a place there, and I’d have a position if I dared, but I don’t dare. It would make me too easy to find and I can’t afford that. So I just do music gigs and editing work and things, there, as long as I can stay beneath notice.”

“I thought you spent your winters with your Countess,” Geralt said thoughtfully. One of the poems had included the patroness’s name, so Geralt knew it now, though he pretended not to have read any of the poems. (It had been printed out on a broadside tacked up on the wall of a brothel, so it wasn’t like he’d sought it out.)

Jaskier looked briefly guilty. “I do that too, sometimes,” he said lightly. “But, ah. I don’t know that she’ll, um.” He gestured at himself, a little sadly. “I don’t know that I’m up to the, ah, _demands_ of the _position_ , at the moment. I’ll probably flee there before the winter’s over, but only if I’ve managed to get some condition back on these bones.” He shrugged into his doublet, making a face when even with the fasteners done up it still hung off him. “Romantic love is fine and all but if you haven’t the stamina for the, ah, _performance_ aspects…”

Geralt didn’t know what his expression was doing but Jaskier stopped, and looked at him with raised eyebrows. “It’s all right,” Jaskier said, “I can get a great deal of poetic mileage out of this, don’t look at me like that. Nearly dying in an epidemic is just the sort of boost any aspiring poet needs. I’ve already got half a ballad composed. I’ll write her a sonnet and she’ll probably buy me an entirely new wardrobe.”

Geralt wrestled himself into continuing to get dressed instead of whatever he’d been doing. The idea that there was nowhere Jaskier could go and just recover, without having to be someone for someone, without having to perform, sexually or musically or-- it all seemed too much, and he had to make himself stop thinking about it. 

_You threw that beautiful boy away._

He had forgotten about the conversation in the barn, those years ago, in their smallclothes, waiting out the rain, and didn’t recollect it until after dinner. The meal was fancy, but sensible, and Solon sat and ate with them, more like a host than a hotelier. They made polite small talk-- Solon didn’t seem overly curious about Geralt’s occupation, but with Jaskier’s prompting, they got Geralt to tell the whole story of the night with the necrophages and the twenty soldiers in the barn. Solon seemed duly impressed but didn’t make much of a fuss about it, which was how Geralt preferred a story audience really. 

He cleared away the dishes from their meal himself, and vanished into the kitchen area for a few moments, having left Geralt and Jaskier with a decanter of cordial. “A couple of weeks here, and you should be filling out that doublet with no trouble,” Geralt commented.

“Ha,” Jaskier said, “I won’t stay here that long. A few more days, is all. But, yes, I already feel so much restored.” He smiled, and there was a kind of a twinkle to his expression that Geralt hadn’t seen there in a while. “Solon promised a treat for dessert.”

“Hm,” Geralt said. 

“I do remember, this used to be your favorite, little Buttercup,” Solon said, coming back into the room with a pair of fancy silver dishes on a tray. He set one down in front of each of them, with a little flourish. Something so cold that cold air flowed off it palpably-- a nondescript white substance, faintly glistening. So cold there was no discernible odor, except for the candied fruit-- orange peel, Geralt had only had candied orange peel once before in his life, and it had been a highlight-- glistening brightly on top, and the sweet smell of the dark brown curls of-- was that chocolate? Geralt had tasted chocolate before too, but only rarely, and knew it was good. This looked like it had thin shavings of chocolate scattered atop it. Those were two heavy marks in its favor even before he addressed the inexplicable substrate under them.

“Do you remember,” Jaskier said, “when I explained ice cream to you?”

“Hm,” Geralt said, interest piqued. He’d thought then that he wasn’t likely to enjoy it, but this didn’t look like he’d expected. 

Solon set a spoon down in front of each of them. “If you haven’t tried it before, let me caution you not to eat it too fast. It hurts your mouth.”

“Gives you a weird headache,” Jaskier agreed. “Don’t bite it, you just sort of-- let it melt on your tongue.”

“Hm,” Geralt said, trying again to smell it. It was starting to melt, along the edges. 

Jaskier dug his spoon into his portion and put it into his mouth, closing his eyes in contentment. “Mmm,” he said. 

Geralt followed suit, carefully. It was ice-cold and melted instantly, coating the surface of his tongue with-- cream, dairy fat, bright sweetness, the sweet-richness of faintly-bitter chocolate and a candied-orange sweetness-- it had a very slightly grainy texture that vanished instantly as it melted, tiny ice crystals in it. But there was no taste of the ice itself, no algae or swampiness-- just cream, butterfat, a little hint of egg, and mostly sugar. 

“Oh,” he said. It was both overwhelming and delicate. “Oh, wow.”

Jaskier was watching him in delight, now. “Your eyes,” he said. “I-- your pupils just went round, all at once!”

Geralt blinked self-consciously. “Uh,” he said. “It’s, um. Yeah, that’s really good.”

Solon laughed, fondly indulgent. “An appreciative audience,” he said. “I’ll pass my compliments to the staff.”

“ _Please_ do,” Jaskier said. 

Geralt tried very hard not to eat too fast. It really was every bit as good as Jaskier had said it would be, and the more so because it was so strangely cold-- it made the flavors release as it melted, the texture changing as first the cream and then the chocolate melted. It was almost dazzling, how good it was. 

Jaskier had finished before him, and was sitting with his chin propped on his hand, elbow on the table. “I thought maybe you’d eat that too fast,” he said, “but I see I underestimated you.”

“The flavor changes so much as it gets warmer,” Geralt said, chasing the last residue of it around the bottom of the dish with the spoon. “I didn’t-- I mean, you described it pretty well, but usually things taste a lot different to me than how other people describe them and usually the difference isn’t good.”

“Is that so,” Jaskier said, interested.

“I’ve learned to take people’s judgements about food with a bit of, mm, healthy skepticism,” Geralt said. He was still tasting things, different layers of flavor, as he licked the last drops of the melted stuff from the spoon. Cow’s milk, chicken egg, cane sugar-- he’d only rarely even had cane sugar in his life, this was all highly exotic. “But, ah. You were absolutely right about that.”

“Hm,” Jaskier said. “I didn’t expect that a man who doesn’t care whether meat is raw would have such a refined sense of taste.”

“It’s not that it’s refined,” Geralt said, “I just-- can taste everything.”

“Ha,” Jaskier said, and he stood to collect the dishes. “I have sat through so many dinners with pretentious gourmands, it would be a real treat to bring you along to one of those.”

“I’m not great at dinners with pretentious anythings,” Geralt said. “I tend to say the wrong thing.”

Jaskier laughed. “Well, I’m glad my favorite childhood treat holds up to your high standards, at any rate.” 

  
  


Geralt stayed another day, spending hours in the hot pools with Jaskier, mostly not talking. His lungs felt enormously better. Solon fed them ridiculously indulgent meals and generally treated Jaskier like a long-lost favorite son. Jaskier’s condition improved noticeably as well. He got his lute out in the afternoon and played a number of songs, and Geralt lay in the sun and listened while napping. 

After a while, Jaskier put the lute away, and came and sat next to him. They sat in silence for a while. 

“Sun feels nice,” Jaskier said, finally. It was maybe the longest he’d gone without talking in Geralt’s presence while conscious.

“Yeah,” Geralt said.

“I think I’ll leave for Oxenfurt in another day or two,” Jaskier said. “I’d sent word to a friend there that I was coming here, and I got a reply from them this morning, that they’ve a place for me when I come.”

“So you’ll be safe there, for the winter,” Geralt said.

“Yes,” Jaskier said. “What about you?”

“I’m healed,” Geralt said. “I have two different offers for the winter, I’m still deciding which one I’ll take.”

“Good,” Jaskier said, “that’s good.”

Geralt yawned, sighed, and sat up. “I’ll probably leave tomorrow morning, then,” he said. “I’d be tempted to stay on here too long, otherwise.”

“This place was… important to me, when I was a child,” Jaskier said. “I’m a little surprised to find it still is.” He smiled, a little shyly. “I’m glad I was able to show it to you.”

“You were right about the ice cream,” Geralt said, but that was all he was going to let himself say; anything more would be too much. 

Jaskier laughed. “I knew it,” he said. “Well, maybe I’ll see you next summer then. I probably won’t go too far from Oxenfurt, I’ve had enough adventure for a little bit.”

“Maybe,” Geralt said, noncommittal. He would probably avoid that area. It was time he got used to traveling alone, again. Though, maybe he’d spend the winter with Eskel after all. Might help ease him out of being so used to companionship. 

He didn’t see Jaskier the next summer after all, which was maybe because he avoided Redania altogether, but it was for the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the end of this work, but I'm still updating [Ancient Sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22894186), a couple more chapters at least, and there's one more chunk of Jaskier Backstory From Geralt's POV that I have to hammer on a bit to see if I can't make it into a something-shaped something. So we'll see.
> 
> I hope y'all are staying safe and all, as much as possible.


End file.
